Basketry Show @ PopUp265
In March of this year I was invited to exhibit my baskets on Water Street in downtown Augusta, Maine. POP-UP 265: A Fresh Artspace is a new kind of commercial art space. It attempts to answer the question, "How do you bring more culture to Augusta on a smaller than shoestring budget?" The Gallery is 250 sq. ft, and offers large windows onto the street. The work presented helps to energize the streetscape, while it engages pedestrians with their downtown experience.
While some exhibits in the space have utilized its full extents, my goal was to put the work as close to the large street-facing windows as possible. This ensured that whomever would pass by, regardless of time of day, could engage to work more fully. In order to accomplish this, I shrunk the space by hanging a series of woven dark blue felt curtains. With these I created a backdrop setback approximately 4 feet from the street facing windows. This left me a narrow strip of space within which I could hang my baskets. Rather than set the baskets on pedestals, I chose to hang the work from the ceiling. The idea of 'floating' the baskets in the space gave them at once an ethereal quality while challenging one's perceptions of how an object can be viewed. Indeed, with the dark woven background, the baskets at times feel as though they are celestial bodies floating in the ether.
For myself as an artist exhibiting the work was a great opportunity to consider many of the baskets that I had woven over the past year at one time. The exhibit made me reconsider each creation and, interestingly, their relationships to one another. These relationships are at once formal, material, and scalar. In addition, by placing the work in this singular location their spatial relationships to each other were, for the first time, also brought into consideration.
On the day of the shows openingI sat in the space for five hours weaving. I kept the doors open so that passersby could enger, see the work firsthand, see the process of weaving first hand, and talk to the maker (me). It was really enjoyable for me to both work and explain the work in real time. There were some friends and colleagues who stopped by could only see images of the work, as well as some of my students who stopped by to see the work. But most interesting, were the strangers who engaged the work, many clearly considering basketry and the making of baskets for the first time.
Tell me about the process.Tell about the process, the fun, the woven curtain, the design of the show, the hanging, the feedback. Post some images too.