Participate in group shows.
As I see it, the main advantage to participating in group shows is exposure. All the artists in the show bring their crowds, and everyone’s work gets seen by new eyes.
And the only drawback to the multi-artist event happens to simultaneously be a very good thing. Agreeing to contribute work to a group show is very similar to accepting a homework assignment. I never liked homework in school, and a few years remove from formal education certainly hasn’t made me warm up to it! Clearly, I work for myself for a reason. That said, taking an assignment can force me to reevaluate my work from an angle that hadn’t even occurred to me until the assignment was given.
When Scott Wayne Indiana invited me to do inClover, I had no idea how far “out clover”* his one day show in a park would push me. I agreed to participate in the show without ever having made a piece to be exhibited outdoors. Over the years, I had observed a number of pieces by other artists dwarfed by the shear bigness of an unenclosed space. I recognized that, in the outside world, art needs to bold as well as sizeable in order to be visible.
With this and the theme of the show in mind, I planned two strips of portraits to be wrapped around a pair of trees, creating two endless cycles of faces. I decided that the portrait cycles would be attached by string to hula hoop segments which I would lash securely around the trees. The hula hoop halves helped, but I realized that the canvas strips couldn’t be more than two feet wide lest they warp when wrapped around the naturally imperfect cylinders of trees. Once I estimated that the average tree in this evergreen-populated park had a circumference of approximately ten feet, the dimensions of my pieces were set: ten feet long and two feet high.
The strips were unwieldy to work on, even in my old studio which was four times the size of my current arrangement. In the end they only barely measured up to the great outdoors!
photo by Scott
The portrait cycles in situ.
Gwenn Seemel
Over Grown Up (Woman)
2006
acrylic on canvas
2 x 10 feet
My multi-faced self-portrait. There’s more information about the content of this piece here.
Gwenn Seemel
Over Grown Up (Man)
2006
acrylic on canvas
2 x 10 feet
The portrait strip of my sweetheart, David. There’s more information about the content of this piece here.
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*To be “in clover” is to be in a place of comfort, ease, and prosperity.
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CATEGORIES: - Practice -
