by donald dusinberre imartsyfartsy@gmail.com
My parents always said, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” However, they didn’t tell me I couldn’t say negative things after the nice stuff.
This past Friday, I visited TSI to see the grand opening of their Opaq Gallery, so I’ll begin with the nice comments. TSI is a pretty hip downtown club, and the Opaq Gallery has loads of potential. It’s upstairs between the entrances to TSI and Mark’s (TSI’s yuppie sibling), and it gives the impression that you’ve discovered something that few others have. Though it’s a small space, you can chat about in-depth artistic ideas away from the thump of dance music, and it won’t overload you with too much content. Plus, I think Opaq is a good name for an art gallery. Bravo for that.
Now, this will be the beginning of my criticism. Due to some presentation and quality issues, my overall impression was completely underwhelming. The physical condition of the gallery was acceptable, though I wouldn’t call it polished. Unfortunately, none of the artwork was presented in a way that could ever transcend the walls around them, which made everything seem even shabbier.
Jacksonville is blessed with an enormous wealth of artistic talent, and if I were curating the opening of a new gallery for emerging artists, I’d have done a few things differently. Not all new and unseen artists know how to properly display their work, but some do, and all curators must. If a curator wants a particular artist’s work on their wall, then it should look its best, because both the artist and the gallery will suffer if it doesn’t. Hopefully, the Opaq Gallery will improve with exposure, as it’s sure to gain popularity. As I said, TSI is a hip place, and everyone knows the best artists are dripping with hipness.
Make no mistake; all the artwork on display at the Gallery had potential. In fact, some of them were conceptually quite striking, but none of them were displayed with the necessary degree of quality.
Emerging artists everywhere, take this advice and use it always: Presentation is important. However sophisticated your ideas may be, they must all be presented to the viewer in an exacting way. There are so many important things other than the image on the picture plane, and the presentation of artwork says more about an artist and his work than most young artists realize.
Display your artwork in the wrong place or context, and its effectiveness is doomed. If you put a crappy frame around your painting, it will make your painting look…well, unfit for ocular contemplation. Viewers will see your crappy frame (or sometimes the lack thereof) and assume that the image within it was made with the same lack of care. They will always make assumptions about the quality of your artwork based on the quality of your presentation, and if you care at all about how your work speaks, then you must consider every issue very carefully. If you don’t care about how your work speaks, then you’re not an artist-you’re a narcissist.
Lighting, placement, framing, context, use of materials, even adjacent works can all affect the effectiveness of your expression. As an artist, you probably put a lot of time, thought, and energy into your work, all to convey something you think is worthy of sharing. Even if it’s not meant to convey the same thing to everybody, you probably don’t want extraneous details muddying your work. In terms of presentation, quality means clarity every time.
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