Wednesday, October 28, 2009

reflection: exhibition

The Call and Response exhibit at the Canvas is a great success. I don't think I (or anyone else at the Canvas) has seen so many people come through on a first Friday - the crowd never died down the entire evening and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive (no one tried to convince me I am secretly a lesbian this time around either!). It sounded like a lot of people were inspired by the project, and there were a lot of sales. Rick and I ended up with 71 joint pieces (about 80 pieces of art for me), so our expectations (as far as production for the show went) were met and all of the walls are filled to the brim (I'll post pictures as soon as I get around to emptying out my camera's memory card).

Aside from the exhibit coming out a success in the end, there were some glitches in final preparations. For one thing, preparing 150 individual frames for hanging can be a lot of work when most of the frames are not equipped with proper brackets for hanging. I wasn't prepared for the amount of time and expense that went into preparing them all. Also, measuring each piece to ensure it would line up to the proper wall height took forever and a half (having to subtract the distance of the hanger from the total height of the exhibit to ensure a straight line across the tops of all the frames took soooooo long). And then nailing in the 150 nails... oh how my arms hurt! I also think Rick didn't anticipate that writing his pieces out by hand would take so much time either; we ended up having to print out about a third of the writing pieces. But it was all worth it, and by the time 4:30pm hit for the opening, we were ready.

The large "call and response" abstract people I painted (with arrows following from one to the other) were possibly my favorite part of the entire exhibit; I liked how it evened out the wall coverage and provided relief for the eyes (the exhibit otherwise, I think, is a little overwhelming with all its small pieces).

Well, onto the next great adventure. Public Market. While not fine art oriented, the Public Market is a creative venue nonetheless. I plan to showcase some of my mad crazy sewing machine and book-making skillz. YEAH. I also want to sell bows and magnet sets: all my items for sale will all be made from recycled materials.