The Commission Exhibition

THE COMMISSION THE BRIEF: PUBLISHING

The Exhibition Option

You are required to research and visit one of the exhibition spaces listed below:

• The Nucleus Arts Chatham Gallery

• Fort Amherst (Gate House)

• Streets of Chatham and Rochester (no gallery space)

You are asked to analyze and carefully study your chosen exhibition space. You must try to

understand the particular context of the gallery in order to understand how it produces particular

exhibitions, how the intention to communicate to its target audience is achieved and what particular

set-up your chosen venue creates.

Please see the questions below, helping you to structure your research and give you starting points

for your process of interrogation.

Consider the use of imagery, typography and particularity of the space.

• How have images been displayed in past exhibitions?

• What atmosphere does the exhibition space create?

• What type of viewers/audience do you think the exhibition space invite?

• What type of exhibitions have been displayed in the past?

• How does the architecture of the venue influence the viewing experience of an exhibition?

• What type of lighting has been used in the past?

• Consider also non-conventional ways of displaying imagery if appropriate

• Consider carefully the sequencing of imagery, scale and method of display.

• Consider the ‘tone of voice’, the colour palettes of the wall and overall design of the exhibition venue

• Consider the entrance image and flow of an exhibition

• What role does text play in an exhibition?

• What impression can a particular exhibition create for the viewer?

• Installation/Reference Ican be found in the Photo Shared Folder in the Year1 Section and is entitled

‘Commission Unit’.

You must choose one of the exhibition places researched as the venue for your own exhibition and

model your own exhibition based upon your understanding and knowledge of your chosen venue.

You can choose to build stud walls if necessary to create additional space or to change the flow of the

way the audience encounters the work.

Your team will need to choose a theme/concept for their exhibition, based upon the commonality of

the images of the group members. You must incorporate the work of all members of your exhibition

group but how you sequence the work and in what order you present the images in the exhibition is

your choice.

You must visit and measure your chosen gallery space and produce a floor-plan including walldimensions.

Your final exhibition must be presented on the floor-plan you created and you must also build a

model of your exhibition space with the images (in their proportional size) included. You also must

present your clear ideas of how you ideally would like the exhibition to be lit.

Additionally, you must also write a press release that indicates the theme and title behind your

exhibition.

HELPFUL INFORMATION

You should consider carefully the roles within your team. The curator(s) are involved in selecting the

images. The writer(s) are needed to write the exhibition text (Press-Release), labels or accompanied

text surrounding the images. The architects, exhibition designers often work very closely with the

curator to shape the exhibition space and give form to the editorial content.

Remember this is a communication and design pitch. The exhibition should give a broad flavor of the team’s

chosen title and illustrate a playful, inventive and creative solution to exhibition curating. However, in the

assessment ‘pitch’ you must justify the choice of exhibition and venue and how you have ‘modeled’ it according

to your understanding of your chosen researched exhibition place.

Exhibition Spaces


Chatham High Street -

I went to Chatham High Street, as not only was it one of our exhibition spaces to choose from but it also had a current street exhibition running, which made it a good opportunity to see how the space might used.
This particular exhibition simply utilised the high streets large open paths, and erected photography mounted on wooden frames.

Fort Amherst


A few members of each group attended a walk around session in the Fort Amherst exhibition space,

and they managed to photograph it as a potential space and take some measurements.

These images essentially show a walk around of the potential exhibition space. As a group we have talked much of this space as we find far more interesting than the other potentials, however upon viewing the space we have realised that we have much of a challenge to meet for this, as it is a far smaller more confined space and it is also a listed building, or site, therefore we have far less options with how we wish to adapt this space, we have to be able to leave it as we found it which presents far more challenges.

Nucleus Art Gallery Chatham


The Nucleus Art Gallery had a far more open plan and adaptable space for exhibition purposes than Fort Amherst, and so would be technically a simpler choice, but also one with a bit artist license or freedom as to how the exhibition should be laid out.

These are the floor plan schematics for the Nucleus gallery, it is a simple space, however as stated that leaves it easily open for adaptation.

Exhibition choice and Plans


Our group has chosen the exhibition space of Fort Amherst for our work.
We felt that though it is a potentially difficult space to work with, the history and originality of the space will create quite a desired atmosphere for our exhibition.
The tunnel structures and various quarters and rooms will a journey for those in the exhibition, but this will also allow us a natural means of arranging our work into mini-series, that whilst having them as one exhibition, will allow the work to also remain in it's own manner separate. As it is a listed building, legally we cannot create any fixtures that alter the premises, no screws in the wall etc. We may move movable furniture, but we have to be able to return the space to the same condition after the exhibition, so we shall erect flats that are either free stand, or simply cut to measure so that we can slot them against the walls and from there we can work however we wish in the wall spaces without touching the original walls.

Ashleigh Wright of our group created a 1-20 scale replica of the exhibition space so that we might visual the space better, and also using 1-20 scale prints create our miniature exhibition.

We will each be assigned a different room or corridor space with the Fort that link together depending on whose work will best placed with whose etc.

Exhibition Theme


We need a specific tagline and theme for our exhibition, as most if not all, of our series we have named, but now we have to cast off those names and fit all these series together, which can be quite a challenge with diversity in work and photographic style.
As all of our projects are an interpretation of the word waste, even though the photographic style and content can be very diverse we have recurring messages and emotions behind our work.

The theme for our exhibition came about when we thought of the messages and meanings behind our work.
As the project is about different, and often metaphorical, forms of waste all collating together in an exhibition we sought to find the predominant recurring theme. Words like abandonment, and also simply the concept of loss, as waste only becomes waste when we, as humans classify it as such. Therefore things are wasted by our action and choice.
Particularly when looking at the photography of wasted buildings, it spurred a tangent of the romantic era of art, as it was at the cusp of the industrial revolution. The art and poetry of the Romantic era showed artists reactions, to this new technology, a new way of life, and the destruction of the old.
Our particular era does not necessarily reflect the context of an industrial revolution, but more the unravelling of our industrial world, with our current economic collapse, and so the artists of our time react to a total change of our way of life, similarly to the Romantics.
Looking through various Romantic Era poetry, the poem "After-Thought" by William Wordsworth, caught our attention, as the title is a poignant reminder of what our work is, an After-Thought.
It is only once the damage is done that something becomes waste, and it is only then we spare it a different approach or thought, which is why Wordsworth's "After-Thought" embodies an overall meaning to our exhibition.

"After-Thought" William Wordsworth


I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away. Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish; be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hjope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.


The Press Release


Being in charge of writing it is my job to prepare a suitable press release for our exhibition, so my first stop was to look at other exhibition press releases and get an understanding of what needs to be included.
So I looked over press releases from the national portrait gallery, particularly the road to 2012 exhibition release.

Road to 2012: Changing Pace
From 25 July until 25 September 2011
Studio Gallery and Ondaatje Wing Main Hall, National Portrait Gallery, London
Admission Free
www.npg.org.uk/roadto2012

ROAD TO 2012: A LOCAL STORY
View Tube, Pudding Mill Lane, Stratford, London
From 27 July until 2 October
An integrated participation project working with local community organisations in the five Olympic host boroughs explores local stories of inspiration, talent and team-work. The project has been documented by East-London photographer Katherine Green and an exhibition of her work will be on display at the View Tube café and arts space in East London. The local groups highlighted in the exhibition are Repton Boxing Club in Hackney, Docklands Sailing Group, Young’s Table Tennis Group in Greenwich and a wheelchair athletics group in Newham. During the exhibition there will also be a series of free photography workshops at the View Tube on weekends led by Road to 2012 photographers including Brian Griffin and Katherine Green.

For further press information please contact: Neil Evans, Press Office, National Portrait Gallery. Tel: 020 7312 2452 (not for publication), Email: nevans@npg.org.uk

To download press images, please visit the press website: www.npg.org.uk/press

For BT press information please contact the BT Group Newsroom on its 24-hour number: 020 7356 5369. From outside the UK dial + 44 20 7356 5369. All news releases can be accessed at our web site:http://www.bt.com/newscentre

For London 2012 Cultural Olympiad information please contact Paul Woodmansey in the London 2012 Press Office on +44 (0)203 2012 461, paul.woodmansey@london2012.com, or visit the website at www.london2012.com Find out the latest from London 2012 HQ on our blog http://blog.london2012.com or follow us on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/london2012team

National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, WC2H 0HE opening hours: Saturday-Wednesday: 10am – 6pm (Gallery closure commences at 5.50pm) Late Opening: Thursday, Fridays:10am - 9pm (Gallery closure commences at 8.50pm) Recorded information: 020 7312 2463 General information: 020 7306 0055 Website: www.npg.org.uk

About BT
BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, operating in more than 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to our customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

BT is proud to be the official communications services partner for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In the year ended 31 March 2011, BT Group’s revenue was £20,076 million with profit before taxation of £1,717 million.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group plc and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.

For more information, visit www.bt.com/aboutbt

About the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival
The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad is the largest cultural celebration in the history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic Movements. Spread over four years, it is designed to give everyone in the UK a chance to be part of London 2012 and inspire creativity across all forms of culture, especially among young people.

Since the Cultural Olympiad started in 2008 11.2million people from across the UK have participated in or attended over 5,400 public performances as part of the Cultural Olympiad and programmes inspired by 2012 and funded by our principle funders and sponsors. Over 67,000 people have attended 6,800 workshops as part of Cultural Olympiad programmes.

The culmination of the Cultural Olympiad will be the London 2012 Festival, bringing leading artists from all over the world together from 21 June 2012 in this UK-wide festival – a chance for everyone to celebrate London 2012 through dance, music, theatre, the visual arts, film and digital innovation and leave a lasting legacy for the arts in this country.

Principal funders of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival are Arts Council England, Legacy Trust UK and the Olympic Lottery Distributor. BP and BT are Premier Partners of the Cultural Olympiad and the London 2012 Festival.

The British Council will support the international development of London 2012 Cultural Olympiad projects. Panasonic are the presenting partner of Film Nation: Shorts.

To sign up for information on the London 2012 festival visit www.london2012.com/festival

I then looked at a rough guidelines website for press releases, so that I had a bullet point system to follow.

What should the press release include?

IMAGE

Your press release should feature one image from your show. There are no rules for choosing an image, but it is usually good to choose a piece which is representative of the entire show either visually or thematically. The image on your press release should be large enough to view easily, don’t use a thumbnail image. It is all about the art after all, right?

INFORMATION

The information for your press release should contain four main parts:

1. All the pertinent and logistical information: your (the artist’s) name, the title of your show, the name of the venue, the location of the venue, and the contact information of the venue.
2. 1-2 paragraphs about the work. This is, traditionally, the most difficult part! This portion of your press release should essentially be an artist statement for the show, and should be clear, concise, and informative. You want this part to be readable and engaging. For tips on what exactly to write in these two paragraphs, please read my post outlining how to write an artist’s statement here.
3. A short paragraph about you (the artist), stating where you are from, where you went to school, and listing a few of your more prominent exhibitions or achievements.
4. “For further information” contact details. This could include a link to your online portfolio or website, or a note saying that more images are available upon request. Make sure to provide your email and phone number to accommodate these requests.

My Press Release 

After-Thought

2^nd – 30^th June 2012

Fort Amherst Chatham

Private view 1^st June 2012 6.30pm

Open to the public from Saturday 2^nd June to Saturday 30^th June 2012

Opening times Monday to Friday 10:00am – 7:00pm; Saturday 10:00am – 3:00pm

The forthcoming exhibition ‘After-Thought’ is a collaboration from several artists, of provocative photography questioning how we treat life in all of it’s forms and processes. Each artist, presents their own ‘mini-series’, showing multiple approaches gravitating around the theme of ‘waste’. Be this metaphorical or literal, the artists delve into what it is we waste, why do waste it? And what makes it waste?

 How do we live? What do take for granted? How do we react to our habitats? Using photography as the mode of engagement, this collaboration of mini series aims to spur social discourse about how contemporary society approaches all things; are our values and ideologies set in stone? Or is it time to step back, take an After-Thought, and change how we live, and how we live with our world.

The exhibition shows recent works from contemporary photographers from the University of Creative Arts, Sacha Stevenson, Martin Wilby, Joe Borsos, Bradley Helbert, Dana Zvarova, Ashleigh Wright and Rebecca Smith.

The exhibition will be hosted at Fort Amherst, Chatham, Medway, within the Fort’s former gatehouse. A full-colour publication documenting the projects will be launched at the exhibition opening.

Further information and press images are available from Sacha Stevenson or Bradley Helbert at: SStevenson@ucreative.ac.uk or BHelbert@ucreative.ac.uk

The Flow of the Work


As it is a collection of varying work we need to look at how we are going to arrange the flow of our work so that it all fits together as one exhibition, however we would like our work to also remain recognisable as our work by separate photographers.

I went to the V&A Museum in London to look at their photography gallery to see how they chose their flow of work and I took some snaps on my camera phone.

The Flow of Our Work


As the space has many separate rooms and corridors, we wanted to utilise this to keep our work individual and to create a journey through the space.
We decided that as our photographic work was so different we needed to find similarities in styles, and we went for a flow of beginning with the photographic work like Sacha's and Bradley's that are of exterior buildings, then as you go downstairs you see Dana's work which is close ups of destroyed and demolished rocks and bricks, the flow then moves to work like mine which is the interior of buildings. As Ashley's and Martin's work is quite different we decided that their should be in the room across the courtyard, so that viewers would have a natural break in the exhibition space before getting to their work.
Again utilising the separate rooms and corridors we where each assigned a room that we could have our own creative control over.
We printed to-scale versions of our photograph to fix to our model of the exhibition space, everything is built and printed on a 1-20 scale.

These images are of my Exhibition space

I wanted to print my images large, and make them part of the room you entered, as the textures and colours of my abandoned building are quite similar to that of the actual exhibition space, so I wanted them to fit in as part of the room, however I also wanted an impact to my images, which is why in this small room I printed so large, so that they would feel overbearing to the viewer to give them more impact.

 Martin's Room

 View of Martin's work, through his view slits

 Dana's work

 Rebecca's Work

 Sacha's work

Being both a curator and in charge of Design Sacha created a poster for our exhibition to promote it's showing. She chose my image of the empty doorway, this choice was made as it had a lot of underlying meanings that where repeated throughout everyone's work, but also it has the metaphor of  an opening, for the opening of our exhibition.

She chose the colours of the poster to reflect the colours within my photograph. This poster will be featured online, and distributed across various universities etc. and at the actual exhibition opening.

Printing


We all decided to keep the same printing and mounting methods, choosing Fuji lustre paper for our digital prints, and mounting them in 'duratrans' for our lighting, all of our prints and mounting/ lighting methods have been totalled by Ashley Wright in a budget sheet.

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1 off	48.00	51.00	77.00	85.00	91.00	117.00	143.00	170.00	222.00	314.00
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5 off	25.00	31.00	42.00	64.00	65.00	91.00	105.00	130.00	169.00	242.00
Quantity prices are for prints from the same image. Prices include VAT

This is our final presentation that we prepared for our pitch day.

Presentation Group E Commission updated


Personal Review


We delivered our pitch within our time slot, other groups where running late that morning so we had to start late but finish on time still for other groups so we felt a bit of rush and pressure.
We each had print outs of our presentation and had added our own notes of what we wanted to say etc.
Overall I think we could have delivered the pitch much better, as it fell just after a massive deadline of our fashion production project running in separate groups alongside this project, we suffered in our group and time management quite a bit, and that really held us back.
So we lacked some preparation in our delivery and some group members had been more involved than others so we delivered our sections of the presentation in a very inconsistent manner.
However we had prepared enough that when asked questions and when we where picked up on things we missed out in our pitch, we still knew what to say, and had involved ourselves in the project enough that we where prepared and confident for all but maybe one or two questions.