This section of the exposition is a compilation of the public-facing materials for the Being & Feeling (Alone, Together) exhibition (click for a summary as a PDF), held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH, USA from March through July 2020.
Being & Feeling (Alone, Together) was part of a larger project with multiple components: exhibitions at the Lamont Gallery and at the MUU Gallery in Helsinki, Finland, and performances, workshops, and other activities.
The global coronavirus pandemic forced the project to take an unexpected turn.
Thank You
So many people contributed to the exhibition: the Lamont Gallery staff, including Stacey Durand, gallery manager, Dustin Schuetz, exhibitions & collections manager, gallery attendants Dale Atkins, Jennifer Benn, Ann McGrath, Aimee Towey-Landry; student gallery proctors; the Communications and Facilities Management departments of Phillips Exeter Academy; and graphic designer Nikki Savramis, among many others.
The participating artists were committed and enthusiastic partners, giving us access to their works, participating in artist’s talks and events, and sharing their perspectives via interviews. Their work continues to inspire and inform me. I am grateful for their involvement.
Finally, our audience members were contributors to this new world of remote cultural production. They attended events with eagerness and a sincere interest in the artists and their practices. We appreciated their continued support for our efforts and their ongoing investment in our programs.
The exhibition announcement (a 6” x 9” printed invitation on glossy card stock) was mailed (prior to the pandemic) to over 2,500+ people on our regular mailing list, as well as shared online through social media.
The curatorial statement was written after the gallery and the Phillips Exeter Academy campus were closed to public visitors, students, and employees. The statement was installed in the gallery late in April, on one of the rare excursions to the space.
One of the programs associated with the exhibition was entitled Moving Together, where we invited choreographic responses to the exhibition's themes. The contributors Moving Together included employees, students, and regional artists.
A Zoom talkback event on 15 July 2020 featured several of the choreographers.
The PDF of the slide show I used for the choreographers' presentation also contains the text of the call for work.
Interviews with each choreographer allowed us to share additional perspectives on their working methods and their pieces. Click the individual choreographers' images in the grid on to go directly to that choreographer's interview, or read the combined text of all the interviews in the PDF.
The PDF document provides information about the participating artists, images of work, and artist statements.
Images of the visual artworks installed in the gallery (what was able to be installed before the gallery access was restricted) are presented in a PDF slideshow and through this 360 degree tour.
The layout was intentionally sparse in order to facilitate the many planned events, performances, and activities that were to have accompanied the exhibition. The layout was also arranged to be able to add components that arose out of public and pedagogical programs. (These additional elements were not realized, since the exhibition was never physically accessible to the general public or to our on-campus audiences.)
The entrance sign and banners were printed and installed. The exhibition poster was printed but never distributed to our regular list of physical locations (which included other academic buildings, dorms, artist-related sites in New England, libraries, etc.).
Events and activities were announced on posters which were distributed electronically and on our website, on social media, in e-blasts, and on the artists' personal online platforms.
We used our newsletter as a regular way to promote exhibition events and resources, as well as share updated information about the pandemic and its impact on the gallery.
Written interviews with participating artists gave the audience additional insight into the artists' themes, processes, and inspirations.
A PDF of the combined artist interviews is below, or you can read each individual artist interview on the original WordPress blog site. The WordPress versions of the interviews contain additional images of the artists’ works.
The project catalogue was a way to process and reflect on the complex feelings of desire, loss, discovery, and commitment that were present throughout the project for participants and audience members alike.
The catalogue was designed to evoke the sensations of being in the gallery rather than a straightforward document of the exhibition. I wanted the audience to experience the elliptical, associative connections between works, texts, and personal interactions that you might feel if you were in the gallery. Reading it was not meant to be a linear experience. For these reasons, quotations and images from various artists are intermixed and juxtaposed.
The catalogue was printed in a small print run and shared electronically. I served as the art director and designer. Production design and printing was provided by Nikki Savramis.
In lieu of the customary in-person programs with artists, programs were held on Zoom. The posters detailing some of these events would usually have been printed and distributed widely. We made a decision to design the poster despite only being able to share it electronically. It is an important record of our activities.
To see all of the artist events in one area, click on the Vimeo page screen shot on the right, or click on the individual artists’ below names to be taken to the event for that specific day.
2 May 2020: Katya Grokhovsky
14 May 2020: Sachiko Akiyama, Lauren Gillette & Tobias Rud
21 May 2020: Stephanie Misa & Riikka Talvitie
29 May 2020: Jon Sakata
16 July 2020: Stephanie Misa
29 July 2020: Andrew Fish & Cheryle St. Onge
The pandemic necessitated that we expand the Lamont Gallery website in a short time period. We added more materials overall, and more in-depth content in a variety of formats so that remote audiences could access our projects.
Screen shots of the top-level Lamont Gallery exhibition website are included in the slide show in order to preserve the original presentation format.
We also secured a dedicated WordPress blog site for adding content on a more regular basis, a Lamont Gallery Vimeo Pro account to host the Zoom recordings and other time-based work, and began integrating other software tools, such as using Adobe Spark to create "Closer Look" highlights, to make the digital content dynamic and accessible.
