Putting up the exhibition--a matter of framing again

Spent yesterday hanging the exhibition. A mixed experience. What seemed a nice amount of works suddenly felt paltry, and I was unhappy with the framing of the smaller drawings.

It's a learning curve: I knew if I was still in the NYSS, I would have had feedback, and people to speak to, and would have found a frame that worked the way I wanted it to. As it was, I allowed myself to be convinced by the framer that the way I initially visualized the frame--two simple pieces of glass, with the drawing pressed between--was impractical, and ended up with a look that was the opposite of what I wanted. It's painful to admit that I now like the way the images of the drawings look more than the works themselves. When seen online, they are freed from their size, and I can imagine them at the scale they should be. Within their frames, they feel constrained, diminished--a pattern I had noticed in exhibitions before, but of which I did not take enough care.

Oh well. There are some things one can only learn through the doing. And I hope that my disappointment with the drawings will encourage new works in which the scale feels right, regardless of framing.

One of the positives side of hanging the exhibition is becoming aware of how much the works interact with each other. There is a constant conversation between the pieces. When put together, the paintings feel different. They change according to where they are hung, how they are hung, and which works they are near. This was a phenomena to which I became sensitive when I saw Titian's Assumption of the Virgin in its original location in Venice. I was left breathless, unable to move for several moments. It was the most intense response I had ever had to a painting, and I realized that it was partially because it was not only a painting. Titian had directed the way light came in, the direction of my steps, the entire encounter. This was art in context, and it is a different experience. That was the catalyst for my interest in installation art, in curatorship, and my eventual involvement in the Goliath Institute of Art--where I was intensely involved in articulating the conceptual framework. Yet being aware of a phenomena is very different than seeing it happen with one's owns works. Seeing how the works changed in relation to each other made them feel more real, more alive. Hanging the show became almost like setting up a conversation.