A new exhibition, I’m Feeling Lucky, now on display at the Elora Centre for the Arts asks the question, can one curate an art show using Google? The answer, apparently, is yes.
Toronto area natives Natasha Chaykowski and Alison Cooley are this year’s winners of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators – a contest for curators under 30 to create an innovative gallery exhibition.
Sara lin Barron, the administrative director at the centre says Elora is very fortunate to be chosen as the host for the prize and believes it is a great networking opportunity for emerging curators.
“In the Canadian art scene there are a number of opportunities for artists and a lot of prizes and a lot of competition, but there really aren’t a lot of opportunities for young curators,” she says.
While Barron was not on the selection jury, she says they typically look for originality and community engagement. She says Chaykowski and Cooley’s proposal was unique.
“They are asking the question, in essence, can you use Google or an online search engine, entering specific search terms … to bring together four or five random artists that all have a unifying theme,” she says.
Chaykowski and Cooley told the Advertiser in an email that the idea for the show came to them while visiting another exhibition – they said they were in amazed by the curators’ ability to assemble a variety of artists from across the globe around a specific theme.
“In awe of the curatorial success of the show, we joked about simply ‘Googling’ a show into existence as a means to reckon with our inability to jet-set around the world doing studio visits and accumulating this sort of encyclopedic knowledge,” they said.
They explained that in order for the concept to work they had to hand over some of their authority as curators to Google because they couldn’t predict what the results would be by simply typing “memory”, “knowledge” or “history” into the search engine. It was only after the results were generated that they could start to make connections between them.
“Curiously enough, very interesting relationships emerged,” they reflected. “For example, Alana Riley’s photograph, which documents a series of marks on a squash court wall over six months, has a compelling resonance with Elizabeth MacKenzie’s portraits of her mother. Each is a sort of repetition of a gesture and in the repetition there is an impulse to remember and the desire to remember through making marks.”
Chaykowski and Cooley say one happy surprise they didn’t expect was that all the artists featured in the show, ended up being women. They said that despite the exhibition being founded on randomness and chance, it has pointed to some larger political issues.
“It’s fairly rare to see shows of all women artists, although it’s not at all out of place for an exhibition to feature only men’s work. This brings up a whole slew of issues related to gender inequality in the art world and the way the internet might democratize the representation of artists,” they said.
With the advent of social media and the popularity of personalized accounts such as Tumblr and Instagram, the idea of curating itself has become democratized. However, the girls say a lot more work goes into creating an exhibition than meets the eye – even when using Google.
“Our day-to-day interaction with images online doesn’t get questioned very often and we think about it being easy to pick and choose pictures and put them together,” they said.
“But actually the experience of putting this show together has been more difficult than our previous experiences working with existing art collections or artists known to us.
“Despite the illusion of easy curating that the internet creates, physically bringing together work you’ve only found online feels unnatural as a way to curate.”
When asked what they hoped viewers of the show would take away from it, the women opted to enter the question into Google. The answer they returned was as follows: “The season 2 finale of Bates Motel gave viewers a lot to think about: Is the Norman we knew gone for good? Will Dylan take over the drug trade? And what was up with that kiss?”
They said this goes to show that Google does not always return what the searcher wants or needs.
“We hope that viewers will take away a curiosity about systems and networks – both real and virtual,” they say.
I’m Feeling Lucky is on display in the Minarovich Gallery at the Elora Centre for the Arts until Nov. 29. The centre is open Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. For more information call 519-846-9698.
