Abstraction on Making Beads

Here is a short clip on my experiment of abstracting footage of me making beads to the point of mainly showing the motions.

My Narrow Critique on the Gallery Space as a Whole

Fresco in Pompeii

Lascauz Cave Paintings

In the past couple hundred years the gallery space has become a matter of much debate. It could be said that the first gallery space was on the walls of caves approximately ten thousand years ago. Then it evolved into frescos for wealthy homeowners then to the walls of massive cathedrals or masques. However, it could be argued that the first official gallery was the Salon de Paris, which opened its first show in 1725.

Talbot Rice Gallery

Omayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria

Salon de Paris

The Lightning Field 1977
Walter De Maria

Since then the gallery space evolved into what we now call the “White Space” which is exactly that, a room or rooms that is purely white to best show what work is being displayed. Then in the 1960’s until now artist felt that the white space was too oppressive, too closed-minded to other forms of art that is not painting, printmaking, sculpture or photography and too aggressively patriarchal. So these artists went beyond the white space. They went outdoors, to rundown factories, homes, and essentially anywhere else. Those spaces where then called “Brown Spaces”.

Now that I have very briefly and narrowly stated the history of the gallery space, I will state my opinion on the matter. What can be said about almost all of these spaces (save perhaps the cave paintings)? Except for a very few incidences, they were all for the rich, the educated, the people who were in the ‘know’.

When I was younger, perhaps between the ages of 11 to 14, I refused to be an artist. Even though I knew that I had artistic talent, I didn’t want to be apart of something that was so persistently closed-minded. Obviously this was in the mind of a very young girl who knew essentially nothing about the art world and the deep, messy hole it has turned into, I was biased toward what I saw. What did I see then? I saw people painting, creating things just for the sake of doing it, just for the sake of selfish ambition. The older I got the more educated I became and realized that art has a great potential of being something more than that. But the way that the art is displayed is still narrow. It confines itself to a specific audience who has far too much power in what is deemed as “good” art or “bad” art.

However, we as artists, have an amazing advantage with the Internet. When the Internet first became a thing, it was slow, small and few had access to it. Even now, we are realizing that the Internet is riddled with flaws. Also, when it first came about a few avant-garde artists used it to create their own work, which was still viewed and critiqued by the usual suspects. Regardless, more and more people around the world now have access to the Internet and the numbers are growing daily.

Though I am sure I could talk about the numbers to prove how much the Internet grows daily, the only example I am going to tell is more personal. When I was at the age of 17, I visited Uganda for the first time. When I left, the friends that I made there wanted to keep in touch, as did I. At the time there were two ways of keeping in contact. The first was by using “snail mail” which would sometimes make it all the way to the United States. The second mode of contact was via e-mail. The only way they could get e-mail was by visiting the local missionaries, which was the only way they could have access to Internet. However, five years later I came back to the same town called Kabale and during that time an Internet Café was opened. When I left Uganda the second time I had gained several friends on facebook whom since then I have chatted with and kept in continuous contact.

All of this to say that the Internet is growing, which should make our work as artists, or even activists, philanthropists, or anything really, easier. They will have more ability to show their work to the world, and perhaps aim to make it better. As a pessimist I know I speak naively, but it cannot be argued that at this moment, change is possible.