What is a Curatorial Smack Down?

The Challenge:
Using work from the Gallery Lambton Permanent Collection "out-curate" the opponents.

The Objectives:
1. To learn more about curating.
2. To learn more about the collection.
3. To de-mistify the curatorial process for our community.

The Questions:
1. How do collections produce meaning?
2. How do curators produce meaning?
3. How does meaning of the work and of the exhibition shift?

The Process:
1. The Smack Down will take place over two 3 day periods:
Round 1 - July 26, 27 & 28
Round 2 - August 3, 4 & 5.
2. Using work from the permanent collection; select, place, inform and defend your
choice.
3. In response to your opponent; select, place, inform and defend your choice.
4. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
5. On day 6, each contender, in addition to their final selection, has the option to
switch or replace one work from the exhibition.
6. Discuss, critique, share and enjoy the process and the exhibition.

DAY 1 - Round 1 - Preparing the space

The first thing we had to do today was finish preparing the walls. There was no time between the striking of the last exhibition and the start of the smack down so we find ourselves having to live with the existing wall color.

The karmic coffee tin

Work in the permanent collection is stored in map drawers, on racks, in solander boxes and on shelves. The gallery registrar put the locations of the work into a coffee tin and each contender selected (by chance) the location that would determine the body of work from which they would make their first selection. Coincidentally, Darryn and Lisa selected a map drawer and Cam a solander box meaning that all works in Round 1 would be works on paper.

Making the first selection

Cam begins his consideration of the prints that are stored in Solander box #6. It just so happens they are all by the same artist, Hugh Mackenzie.

Mackenzie is a Canadian artist, who's practice swings between figurative and industrial abstractions. This self described painter-etcher, also retired from a long career as an art educator. Mackenzie taught at Ontario Collage of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, H.B. Beal Secondary School, the London Public Library and Art Museum, and interestingly for the Sarnia Art Association, in 1966.

In a Curatorial Smackdown, the first choice is often the most difficult because there is no real framework within which to make your decision. Other than maybe the color of the walls, the other exhibition in the gallery or the piece you react to the most intensely, either positively or negatively.

Solander box #6 contained several small prints of differing examples of Mackenzie's reoccurring content. Two figurative prints stood out among the others, Cam chose a small aquatint (5 1/16" x 3 11/16") entitled Seated Figure, 2001. Seated Figure illustrates Mackenzie's use of contrast and ability to carve out a figure that embodies its own emotive abstraction, as the lines that make the image hold the emotion of the figures posture.

This relationship between image and process is described by Andrea Green, a student of Mackenzie's, who wrote the essay in our catalogue for a show titled The Etchings of Hugh Mackenzie in the Collection of Gallery Lambton. Unfortunately the catalogue contains no dates for the show, but Cam gathered from Gallery staff that it was somewhere between 2002 and 2005. In the catalogue essay, Green sources years of letter correspondence and presents it as a personal letter, addressed to her a mentor, Mackenzie. She admires,

“In your new affinity for light, you discovered energy and found the immateriality of matter and the ability to disolve substance. I can think of no more difficult alchemy than to coax light out of zinc, yet your action on the etching plate produces this transmutation.”

There's an irony, but also a logical progression, to hanging this first selection in the same gallery as the just closed ArtOP: Gallery Lambton's Instructors Show. Smack Down II is turning out to be a very educational experience.

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.

Day 1: Don Harvey

Darryn settled on a serigraph (silkscreen print) by Don Harvey entitled Off Centre, 1966. The dimensions are 18" x 17".

Donald Harvey was born in Walthamstow, England in 1930. Harvey then taught in Wales, Sicily, and Spain before immigrating to Vancouver, Canada in 1958. He is now a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy and retired as a Professor of Fine Art at the University of Victoria, where he taught drawing, painting, and printmaking. He completed his National Diploma of Painting and Design at the West Sussex College of Art in 1950 and in 1951 he completed his Art Teacher's Diploma at the Brighton College of Art.

This print was purchased from The Print Gallery in Victoria which served as a vehicle for contemporary artists like Jack Shadbolt and Tony Onley who were also working in non- representational compositions. This is an interesting relationship for Gallery Lambton since we also have some work by Shadbolt in our collection. I also see a connection to artists like Guido Molinari who had a keen interest in the surface of a work of art. As the shapes overlap and intertwine with one another, a deep sense of surface is developed. This becomes filled with tension in certain areas of the print as the bottom layers optically fight their way back to the top.

In reference to English art critic Walter Pater, Harvey was quoted as saying that all the arts aspire to the condition of music. “Music comes to you, but you have to go to a painting. A painting requires imagination and involvement to make the body and intellect respond in a lively way.” [Vancouver Sun, April 11, 2010]. There seems to be a kinetic energy built into this print. The colours are very consistent in their value, so that when there is an edge between two colours, certain instability develops. Between this use of colour and the forms themselves, the image retains energy. In this way, we can think of the work of Wassily Kandinsky whose work tried to take us on a physical and mental trip.

As his later work attests to, Harvey gradually accepted a tendency toward landscape, and the role of nature in our lives. More accurately though, Harvey was interested in the effects of mans’ intrusion and intended control of that landscape, colliding the geometric with the organic.

Don Harvey is represented in many Canadian galleries including the National Gallery of Canada, Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal, Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, Seattle Art Museum, and the Canada Council Art Bank along with many private collections. He has been actively exhibiting since 1951.

Discussing the placement

Lisa ended up choosing the first work she saw when she opened the drawer. The work is a serigraph (silkscreen print) by John Boyle entitled Northern Landscape, 1976 (17" x 24"). It's interesting to note that a different work by Boyle (a painting entitled Vincent) was Daniels first choice in the first curatorial smack down as well, although the reasons for making the choice are quite different.

Boyle is a London Ontario artist who was very involved in the artist run centre/London arts movement back in the 1960s. Boyle has an interesting tie to Sarnia. During his career he submitted a painting into a group show at the London Museum but his painting, that of himself, naked in a chair, was considered to risqué. Since he was denied admittance to the show, all of his friends pulled their pieces out of the show in protest. The shows next stop was in Sarnia where all of the pieces were displayed, including the Boyle.

The reason Daniels chose Boyle in the first Smack Down was because she had a lot of difficulty with his work and wanted to set up a situation where she was forced to consider it more seriously. As a curator in a public institution, one must often separate themselves from works that they are naturally drawn to and consider all works in the collection with equal rigor.

It was not a surprise to Daniels that when she opened the drawer this time round, the Boyle presented itself to her. Boyle is a strong nationalist, at times to the point of being almost anti-American. Questions regarding the Group of Seven, national identity, the Canadian landscape and national pride are inescapable if you're a curator in a Canadian public art gallery that has works by the Group in their collection.

The permanent collection exhibition currently up in the gallery next door includes work by the Group of Seven, so to have the opportunity to place Northern Landscape within close proximity to the work by the Group will, at least for awhile, allow us to consider how the influences of and mythologies created by the work of the Group have been addressed by other contemporary Canadian Artists.

The fact that the title is Northern Landscape, and the image is a portrait of a white male Cowboy and an Aboriginal male, sets up a number of questions and challenges for the viewer, particularly within the context of Canada's social and cultural histories, national identity, and the grip of the Group. It's too early to tell how this piece will relate within the overall exhibition as all the pieces are quite small, very different and have not been hung in relation to each other. We'll see what day 2 brings...