WTG_ 45 ( happenstance and continuance) opened on Saturday last. It was an intense installation followed by a memorable opening day. Here are some of the people as they look through the show and some gather at the end for a group shot.
WTG_ 45 ( happenstance and continuance) opened on Saturday last. It was an intense installation followed by a memorable opening day. Here are some of the people as they look through the show and some gather at the end for a group shot.
Michael is tracing a stencil multiple, As Long As It Lasts, by Lawrence Weiner for the laser typesetter. The work will be made with laser cut red letters and installed on the outside window of the Project Room for the 45th Anniversary exhibition, WTG_happenstance and Continuance. This work was installed in the same location for our first exhibition, PLAY, and for a full first year at our 401 Richmond Street space. It was also installed as a “reflection” within the same exhibition, as seen below. It is fitting that it be installed again for our last exhibition here.
We first exhibited the work of Lawrence Weiner in 1997 for a solo exhibition of the major work, With the Passage of Time. Lawrence also made four new drawings at that time to accompany the wall installation. The work, pictured above, was purchased by a private collector and eventually donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The working sketch for With The Passage of Time is included also in this current exhibition.
As installations will go there are often challenges. The slide stack came down unceremoneously during the night. Back to the drawing board and a better way than double-sided tape to install the column to withstand the forces of the busy 401 Richmond building.
The Slide Stack
So far we have been, and will continue to, look through our history, writing stories as we go along. For today’s entry I have taken some shots for the blog of the installation in progress for our upcoming 45th anniversary exhibition.
Up until about 10 years ago all of our images and documentation were primarily on 35mm slide film and mostly taken by David. Any time we documented a show or some new work in the gallery we bracketed the shots so that we would have at least 6 copies of each at 3 different exposures. It was considerably cheaper (and better quality) to have 6 slides of the same work than, to later, duplicate the slides to meet requests. That meant we gathered a very large slide library over the years.
Now during the process of digitizing the slides, (Michael Tuck, our son, is the computer master and general jack of all trades around the gallery during the downsizing) we have had to edit and reduce the collection to the key documentation. That left us with several thousand slides for the garbage or recycling.
Each of us had other ideas for re-purposing the slides.
For one, it seemed to me that the slides and their inherent history needed to be a part of this 45th anniversary exhibition.
The Red Cart
There are always surprises when a group show is in progress. Here is Charlene discovering some hidden “treasures” in the old cart -a phone receiver with no phone attached and various other assorted hardware that seemed to have no good reason for being there, but I’m sure did originally. In the background is the slide installation in the beginning stages nearby a painting by Angela Leach and many decisions still to be made.
The cart was found in our new space at 80 Spadina Avenue in 1982 when we were moving from 83 Front Street . At that time it was an old 4 wheeled dolly with only one fence. We needed it to be double-ended to hold the many works of art that we had to move and since our space at 80 Spadina would be 6500 square feet (and the whole fourth floor we were renovating with our neighbour, Olga Korper, was 20,000 sq ft. ). The General Welding School, our old neighbour from Jarvis Street welded a second fence for us. We thought this would be a good cart to have around. We were right. The cart was put to good use over the years.
It became the Red Cart when Fela Grunwald was renovating her space at 80 Spadina (the third gallery on the fourth floor there). She needed it as a good base with wheels to use as a scaffold for finishing and painting her walls. Since the cart was going to get renovation grime and paint on it she offered to paint it any colour we wanted after she was done with it. Red was our colour of choice.
It might end up in the current installation which is coming along nicely –more later.