Making the first selection

Darryn begins his consideration of the work available to him in map drawer #11.

After we each picked a location out of the karmic coffee tin, it was clear that we would all be selecting works on paper. There is nothing wrong with this... on a normal day. Today our gallery registrar and in-house framer, Shelly Mallon, was out of the office. This meant that the framing was up to us curators. Again, normally there is nothing wrong with this. However, after my top three picks from that location couldn't find a frame to fit with the matting that was with it, I decided that I would have to wait for Day 2 when Shelly would be able to cut me a new matte to fit a frame.

It is things like this little hiccup that most people don't think about once a show is finalized and opened for public viewing. By that time, everything that needs a frame will have one and these presentation concerns are less visible. It was a fitting start to the Smackdown though; these sort of things are issues to consider when a curator is going through any permanent collection. This initial experience, in my Smackdown debut, left me with a mixed impression. On one hand, I wanted to stick to my initial decision and choose the work that I felt was my strongest first choice. Weighing against that was the desire to have my work hung and properly displayed by the end of day one. In the end, I got to keep my initial choice.

Storage is obviously very important for an issue like this. It is not practical (or possible) to keep everything in its own dedicated frame. Because of this, much of the paper-based works are kept in these map drawers and solander bins. They are all maintained inside a matte (of better or worse condition) and they all have an archival (acid-free) piece of tissue paper on the surface of the image. These conditions are necessary to maintain paper-based artworks for long periods of time without deterioration or discoloration.

Anyways, as my two competitors waged on with fitting frames, I was left to wait until the next day. All that was left for Day 1 was to gather research on my choice, Donald Harvey.