Anne-Marie Gray Art: Artist vs. Curator

Learning Outcome 12, explains to the Art Student that they must communicate effectively to a range of specialist and non-specialist audiences using means appropriate to their practice. What they are looking for, is empathy towards the audience. Therefore, the artist must act as curator as well in the exhibition of their work.

Kwanyi Pan (Curator at the Mission Gallery, Wales, UK) says, “A curator is not a creator but a facilitator for both the audience and the artists and a messenger who delivers ideas from contemporary society. A good curator needs to understand the audience and to fully communicate with the artists to let their work speak out to the public.”

Since each artist must act as both curator and artist, both sides must be developed together. The work must be created with the exhibition in mind. In this case, the exhibition is must be considered either before the piece is completed or during its completion. In regards to my photographs, which are in essence "complete", their photographic edits, scale (in terms of printing and relation to the scale of exhibiting wall) and arrangement must be carefully considered so that the audience is told a proper tale. The work is being created or transformed for installation. Rather than each photograph being exhibited as sole works that are collectively presented, I must engage the audience by presenting a collective story through individual pieces. The story is of Sean and is a portrait of his life and/or the various views that describe him and his personality.

Since, Hannah Wallis and Holly Stubbings are known NUCA student curators, I will get their opinion on my exhibition set up ideas. (Perhaps by using the Art Exchange, Holly Stubbings initiated project.)

A work of art should, presumably, challenge or disrupt the viewer's expectations about a given image, object, or system of meanings and that the viewer, in turn, should require this disruption to overcome his or her reliance on habitual forms of perception.

In, 'Conversation Piece: Community and Communication in Modern Art' (2004) by Grant Kester, there is an engagement in the emergence and consolidation of a general discourse of avant-garde art during the twentieth century. In it, there is specific attention to Rachel Whiteread's House.

The Rachel Whiteread's project, House (1993) was a cast of an interior of a Edwardian terrace house in one of Lodon's poorest boroughs, Tower Hamlets. "House, like a photograph, is linked to an absent original - in this case the actual house whose destruction brought it into existence…The work serves to reveal the inability of conventional language to grasp the infinite complexity of the world and the naive, and possible reactionary constraints of a 'confectionary' consensus about the world. Here, consensus, or shared understanding is associated with something inviting but insubstantial or even unhealthy while the reputing of consensus takes on an explicitly therapeutic value."