Notating Arrangements

Much of the placement of works and elements in my exhibitions is done in the gallery with the objects themselves (although I do extensive mapping and planning beforehand, on paper and digitally). Arranging work is one of the most dynamic aspects of the curatorial process. It is where I begin to be able to articulate what I hope to share, as well as make discoveries about what I am seeking. Once in the gallery, the work transforms the space and my perception of it, which guides the arrangement in unexpected ways. The physicality of gallery also contributes: it is a not a white cube. It has its own ways of provoking audience interaction due to its architectural and material elements.

Intersecting Conversations

The gallery composition for Open House could have run solely along a geographic trajectory, or a chronological one, or grouped according to taxonomy—all common ways of presenting collections. (These are movements, too: material, spatial, temporal, affective, and epistemological.)

Throughout the process, I thought deeply about what objects get saved, what they communicate, why we build collections, and why we spend so much money storing them. While a part of my inquiry stemmed from sociopolitical concerns (raised in the exhibition introduction), the questions for the exhibition were ultimately about emotion. My main compositional impulse for Open House was that of affective intersection. I wanted to create multiple, simultaneous, intersecting moments for experiencing joint attention, for sharing memories, and for creating empathy.

The objects were intersecting into the space(s) of the gallery, into various knowledge systems (the history of art, the materiality of popular culture, etc.), and into the desires of the collectors and the audience. Many of the initial intersections were intentional. Others did not register until later.

Audiences enjoyed the collections, as well as the stories they provoked in terms of their own life histories, or the insights the objects provided about people's colleagues and neighbors. The exhibition inspired many repeat visits, bringing forth conversations, stories, memories, and other reactions.

Unbeautiful

Visually, the layout was unbeautiful. It was jumbled, crammed, chaotic, uncoordinated, and unfocused. This was intentional: while care was taken in the art of arrangement, this care was not to produce the contemplative space of the modernist singular art object and its steady sidekick, the aura, or to create a comfortable personal space for the objects so that their “authentic message” could be perceived. While the layout was intended to foster affective and interpersonal intersections, it did not (intentionally) attempt to provide the novelty of “juxtaposition as exotica” of the cabinet of curiosity model, though this was probably the effect in certain configurations.

Works and texts were a little too tight, too high, too low, too close, too far, too “here” or too “there” —as much as possible like someone’s mantelpiece, bedroom vanity, or living room shelf. The act of adding objects throughout the exhibition as part of Significant Objects underscored the meandering, conversational, and accumulative nature of community and relationship, by proximity and by continued encounter.

The images and texts in this section include overview photographs and some details of objects intersecting in the space. It is impossible to capture every vantage point or perceptual combination. Instead, I have attempted to give a sense of the formal, functional, aesthetic, and affective force of the objects in their various arcs of connectivity, amicability, surprise, argumentation, and thematic furtherance.