Signs and Calls: On your own Exhibitions
This week I found out my the jacket I made this winter had been rejected from its third submission. It wasn’t a shock. I had felt it coming.
I also know the process of getting one’s art out there is a series of attempts and rejections. Just like job hunting, just like any building of networks. It’s part of the process.
But the rejection bothers me in that I do not understand what people aren’t seeing in it. I made it with care and thought. I wove it out of different cultures and different movements. I made it to speak to my moment and my context. When I see it I see the love I poured into it, and I see my own warrior spirit.
Quite honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it before. That was on purpose. I don’t understand why the people curating these spaces don’t want to have something that is new, strange, of the moment. I would if I were them.
But perhaps, that is why I am not in the roles they are. Perhaps that is why I am here at ceremony gathering more stories, more thoughts, and they are sitting in their offices.
But…
Today I made my own exhibition. I don’t need to wait on others permission to share my work. I hung it by where we will line up for food so others might see it. I wrote up a little card for it in the gallery format.
There is power I think in using that format for introducing it, the one the industrial world uses to tell you its value, and yet putting it up in a place rough and distant from that same world. This place has no walls, just sun which makes the pale yellow less cream and more dandelion, and people who I know care about me.
There are people here who look at the things I bring and see that is it medicine. Why should I not “show” it for the first time here?
I’m declaring today the opening of my first solo exhibition. It’s one piece hung on an electrical cord on the Feast Women Steps and it makes me feel like I am the real deal.
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nobody can claim that this isn’t a real exhibition because it made me tear up looking at it. and what is an exhibition except reaching out to someone else
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This is a zine at a craft fair. This is a video on YouTube. This is a song played on the street. Right on, my friend.
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Structures often fail what they ought to support, alas. But they are mutable, and replaceable. I believe in the random chaos of the universe but I'm also a superstitious fellow; I think that regalia has a target in mind and will be satisfied by nothing--or no one--less.
My senior thesis hinged around a video game I made with my brother called Beloved about two space monsters, Beloved and Leviathan, at the beginning of the universe who end the game with the whole map between them. After the school show, a friend made off with the big Beloved portrait, and I have the massive print of Leviathan sitting in a closet all these years later. Maybe, like in its story, it will roil in darkness long after its creator has passed. (But it would be nice to see some money for it. It was expensive to print and frame.)
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my friend Jack told me this: they aren’t the right person if they can’t compensate you. If you can’t be in true exchange. Someone might think they’re called to a piece (sash in his case) but if they can’t copmensate you they aren’t. Some might compensate you in love, or on going relationship, or teaching. But most should do money.
Someone will come for that piece sometime. Maybe just hang it somewhere like i did my jacket. And see who comes.
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