About the Project

This database is a component of Collectively Speaking, a current exhibition by Calgary-based artist, Vera Gartley, at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada.

Collectively Speaking is an interactive installation featuring four official Glenbow collections and two others representing the artist and her mother. The individuals represented by these images and collections come from different cultural and class backgrounds. Mounted on top of six large images in the gallery space are over ten thousand small fridge-magnet images. Each magnet--displaying an artifact and its archival number--has its counterpart in this database.

Viewers are invited to peel a magnet off the wall to take home. As the magnets are removed, the large images are gradually revealed. Using the magnet's archive number, viewers can access this database to find out more about the artifact on their magnet, and get a glimpse of the artist's research process. The texts about the objects are excerpted: from conversations between the artist and Glenbow curators; from interviews; from the artist's journal; or from publications.

http://collectivelyspeaking.vanitygallery.com/

http://www.vanitygallery.com/gartley/gartley/

About the Project
A previously undiscovered sequence of paintings from a number of domestic settings is brought together by Vera Gartley and installed with her own text-based works at the Edmonton Art Gallery. The story began when Carolyne Gartley watched a visual busker painting a landscape at a small town sports day early in the century and it found a home in her grandmother's parlor. Half a century later the family had multiple copies made for nostalgic reasons. The Gap is an ongoing collection of copies of the original and conversations about it--accessible through audio, print, and digital media. The texts are excerpts from personal, popular and specialized viewpoints recorded over time. Some issues that have emerged from these collected texts include hierarchies of judgment; notions of the original; the value of copying; the gap between "amateur" and "professional"; and the meaning of "improvement" in the realm of landscape.

The installation itself will be comprised of commercial signs derived from the copied landscape; the original painting with multiple painted copies; and a number of different stations. The formal appearance of the gallery is important because the viewer/participant needs an overall vision of a defined format before they plunge into disparate components. Through the profusion of these components and the invitation to participate the work expands to become something rather than being about something.

The gallery space symbolizes a gap - a sort of laboratory for experimental and spontaneous transmissions of language and images - in which responses to the landscape installation are welcome and will be collected from web browsers and gallery goers before and during the exhibition. Some thoughts submerge, others emerge and are captured at the moment or are saved and stored with analog or digital technology. The gap serves as an undefined or immaterial space from which the next thought may arise.


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