Three Rooms
24 October – 31 December 2016
curated by Fiona Buchanan

 
A group exhibition featuring the work of Tim Brawner, Lucas Page, Natalie Lerner, Paul Fiore, Rebecca Ness, Rebecca Shippee, curated by Fiona Buchanan
 
 
^{Click on each of the rooms to enlarge.}

 
 

 
 

 
Most artists in 2016 have websites. Almost all represent themselves online in some form and so must constantly negotiate their in person and online presence. Many see on-the-ground availability as ideal (markedly those working in corporeal media such as painting, drawing and sculpture) and extraterrestrial based showing is generally utilized to supplement and support in person viewing of the art object itself.

Online exhibition is of course beneficial not just for the eager artist but for the aspirational viewer. Gallery and museum websites, exhibition reviews and secondhand media of art create a wider scope of availability. From The Frick Collection where you can virtually explore its galleries to sites such as artsteps.com where digital rooms are constructed to hold walls of paintings you can find a way
— with an internet connection — to experience something between the physical and the ephemeral in art.

The concept of the online exhibition is nothing new, but for this show at galleryELL I wanted to call attention to the reasoning behind creating one in the first place. The online exhibition is a place to experience the triplet of art, curation and writing in a widely available form. While It does not provide the viewer with the same experience as a physical show would, it grants access to the knowledge of the art’s existence. The universality of an online show is meaningful to me in that it infuses the art, artist(s) and curator with inclusivity. It also possibly transforms the viewer into something else: a researcher, a collector, a discoverer. In this purgatory of art spaces there is flexibility for identity and place.

In each of these three “rooms” I create a flattened space in which I bring the notions of real life viewership to the forefront of the screen. The images are not sized or placed with respect to the scale of the works but in accordance with my ideas of curation. Rather than deliver images placed within the model of a room this language of flattened space attempts to actively engage the screen viewer. What’s left to the imagination serves as a medium between what is on screen and what could be in real life.

These spaces foster an opportunity for works to meet that might not otherwise and bend some of the normal needs and constraints that bar certain works of art from mingling. Rebecca Shippee’s watercolors are each a part of a larger series within notebooks that she creates on site. To see them traditionally we would need to leaf through bound pages on a table or pedestal. Lucas Page’s Paintings are created digitally via iPhone and with this readily available technology can share them almost instantaneously. While we can easily imagine a room that could support both these works as objects, here, we are made to consider their relationship in a new way.

A mouse click brings these works to the surface of our internet search and in turn the agency of the work itself, intrinsic to the manner in which it is created is altered. Indicators of tangibility and scale to our own presence are lost. Through this, perversely, we gain a different kind of agency as viewers/researchers/discoverers. A momentary break with physicality brings the artists as a group and works as a whole to a far reaching spectrum of accessibility and surprisingly down to earth.

^{Click on an image below to view this section as a slide show.}

 
 

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About the curator:

Fiona Buchanan was born in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Buchanan received a BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2014. She was a participant in the Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2013 and the Wassaic Artist Residency Project from 2014-2015. She currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY.

galleryELL would like to thank Fiona for putting together this outstanding exhibition.