Finalise the Major Project for public output.
Exhibition Design
Part 1 – Words
If I consider that the art gallery space has an inward gaze. Many have no windows, with plain walls and ceilings and the hushed voices of visitors who shuffle from one artwork to the next. It seems that art galleries are like libraries where the artworks and books are the windows. These virtual windows don’t let us see the outside in a direct way but they permit the mind to leave the shell of the room and to roam free. Brian O’Doherty writes about how we see the building or room which houses the gallery space before we see the art. Ideally, “The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art.’ The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.” (O’Doherty, 1986, p. 14) I think it is impossible to completely divorce an artwork from the space where it is placed. O’Doherty goes on to speak of the gallery space and how it interacts with the artworks placed there, is the empty gallery filled with “elastic space” by which I take the meaning of potential? “[The gallery’s] content leads in two directions. It comments on the ‘art’ within, to which it is contextual. And It comments on the wider context- street, city, money, business – that contains it.” (O’Doherty, 1996, p. 322). These thoughts around art and space are not necessarily things which I can change but it adds importance to the comment made to me by my tutor that I should not allow the practicalities of space to dictate my narrative. Bruce Barnbaum tells us that photographs deserve “appropriate presentation” He expands on what appropriate might mean, saying, “The presentation should enhance the photograph without overwhelming or detracting from it. The best presentation is understated, simple and conservative.” (Barnbaum, 2013, pp. 241–242) Barnbaum writes about the choice of mount rather than the exhibition space, but his comments apply to both points.
Another thing which at first sight might seem of little importance concerns the text which is attached to the image and which introduces the project. John Berger writes of the inability of words to adequately capture the essence of photographs by André Kertész. “…each image is indescribable in words. Appearances have their own language.” The photograph Berger tells us is “weak in intentionality. (Berger, 2013, pp. 65, 137). Terry Barrett agrees, writing about the “cultural myth” that photographs can be seen as a “Universal language”. Instead, he says that “photographs, despite their usually great specificity of information, are relatively indeterminate in meaning.” (Barrett, 1997, p. 114) This point is crucial to designing my exhibition, how I position my work and form a sequence, how I introduce my project and how I title each work. The words have a special place, as the wrong choice can change the context of my art. Berger tells us of images of book burning and says that the captions are needed to understand the photograph’s significance. (Berger, 2013, p. 65) This idea of fixing the significance or context is of vital importance, as I saw when I experimented with the medical scan, transferring it to the art gallery wall. The words, or indeed the lack of words, which can help guide the audience to a certain place or the lack of words providing no guidance, clearly have a pivotal role. This reminds me of work I researched earlier in my degree about Alfred Stieglitz and his photographs of clouds. These works were seen as being less representational than pictures of landscapes and of static things and were much more anchored in the emotional state of the photographer and the audience. The images of clouds “could express pure emotion, paralleling the artist’s own inner state”. There is an element to my work which exists in this emotional state. How the images aided by my words combine to make one is part of my project, but it is interesting to consider Stieglitz’s Equivalents and to see how my work measures up in terms of visual art assuming nonrepresentational, emotionally evocative qualities. (The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 2016) I am stuck by how Stieglitz chose to title these works. The first series of photographs was titled “Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs”. Getty Museum tells us that “brooding black skies evokes the personal, familial tumult then occurring in Stieglitz’s life.” (Getty Museum Collection, 2024), and yet there is nothing in the title of these works to hint at this turmoil. Instead, the audience must decipher this from the shade of the clouds, the land and the mood of the photographs. There is a mismatch I see between the titles and the artist’s emotional state. There is a lesson for me when I attach words to my own artworks. Berger writes of the choice of the photographer in whether to explain the message behind their work through the photograph itself to explain the meaning of its recording. “Photography is the process of rendering observation self-conscious.” (Berger, 2013, p. 19) An extension of the explanation of the artist’s meaning is to add words. The choice then of which words, how many words, the order of words and even the font used and the size of the words requires much thought.
References
Barnbaum, B. (2013) The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression. 1st edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Rocky Nook Inc.
edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Rocky Nook Inc.
Barrett, T. (1997) ‘Photographs and Contexts’, in Goldblatt, D. and Brown, L. (eds) Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts. Prentice-Hall, pp. 110–116.
Berger, J. (2013) Understanding a Photograph. Edited by G. Dyer. London: Penguin Classics.
O’Doherty, B. (1986) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Lapis Press.
O’Doherty, B. (1996) ‘The Gallery as a Gesture’, in Greenberg, R., Ferguson, B. W., and Nairne, S. (eds) Thinking About Exhibitions. London: Routledge, pp. 321–340.
Getty Museum Collection, (2024) Stieglitz, A. (1922) Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, Getty Museum Collection, Available at: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/104JCV (Accessed: 27 December 2024).
The Alfred Stieglitz Collection (2016) The Alfred Stieglitz Collection: Equivalents, Art Institute of Chicago. Available at: https://archive.artic.edu/stieglitz/equivalents/ (Accessed: 23 December 2024).
Part 2 – Layout
As part of my planning, I visited the gallery a few times, I have spoken to artists holding exhibitions and to the curator. I have a plan of the gallery space and have taken photographs showing the space.
Internal Considerations
I have gathered some thoughts about the exhibition space.
- My planning and execution of the exhibition will have a huge impact on how successful it is and how my audience views my works in the gallery space. With that in mind, I have contacted the gallery to provisionally book two weeks from the 9th April 2025 and ask about their specific rules and guides for setting up the exhibition.
- A CSV inventory is required for all the works in my exhibition including any smaller prints should I decide to produce these. Each item needs to be individually coded and priced and these details added to the CSV inventory.
- A Word document listing all of my items. The document is to be used to colour dot all sold items for collection at the end of the exhibition.
- Thinking of the opening night, the gallery needs to know if I require contacts for local wine/beer merchants and catering.
- Opening hours and days. The gallery opens from Wednesday to Sunday, 11.00 am to 5.30 pm.
- A deposit of 50% of cost is required in advance of the booking. The gallery charges £200 per week plus a 15% commission on sales.
- Setup of exhibition. Gallery staff would meet me the day before the start of the exhibition to help set it up. This is normally done between 9.00 am and 5.00 pm.
- Exhibition description for use on their website and social media posts.
- Pre-exhibition requirements are that an A1 poster, project description and deposit are required 3 weeks before the start date. The CSV file and list of stock is required before the exhibition setup and before the delivery of my exhibits. While the exhibition description sits within the gallery space, it, like the exhibition poster, also has an external outward-looking element and is used to speak to the wider audience to try and draw them to the gallery.
Layout, Order and Word Placement
Along with my choice of the order of my work, the titles I will assign to each image and how the introductory text sits within my exhibition are things I have spent time on over the past few months.
- Labels – My artworks will use labels which I will print at home and mount on foam core. To attach on to the gallery wall I will use double-sided foam tape.
- Project Introduction – The introduction will match the font used on my labels and will be printed at home and mounted onto foam core board. I will attach to the gallery walls either by using double-sided foam tape or Velcro fastening.
- The introduction will be the first element the audience encounters as they come up the stairs into the exhibition space.
“Scatter by Richard Dalgleish is a deeply personal and emotional exploration of the spaces between life and death. Inspired by my daughter’s eighteen-month journey through cancer to her death and by my parallel journey as I watched her die and was compelled to embark on a period of learning and self-reflection in an attempt to comprehend loss. The richness of my memory of my daughter, my engagement with her death and my gradual acceptance and understanding of grief means that my work is emotionally charged but with a palette which has relevance for the wider society. My daughter Rebecca does not feature directly in this exhibition but her being runs like a thread through this project.”
Plan for artwork layout.
The main wall space in the gallery is to the right and left of the fireplace. There is room for one artwork to the left of the fireplace and up to six artworks to the right of the fireplace, depending on size and space I give around each work. I have shown a photograph of another exhibition on page 4 of this document where the artist has placed six images to right of the fireplace.
I attach a list of my artworks showing order and title.