Oct 7th

Oct 7th was the last day of Jeff Hallbauer’s solo exhibition – At the Hour of Closing Summer. Usually the last day of any exhibitions are crucial, Wil told me that we were expecting lots of visitors. It was my first time being a gallery reception. Looking at Jeff’s patternistic paintings, all of them depicted vivid and repeated patterns. Through a conversation with Jeff, these paintings were based on specific animation portraitures source material. “Placing these elements up against each other, the paintings are evocative of similar experiments in the deconstructing and parsing of language in modernist poetry.” The repetition of same patterns reminds me artistic labour (immaterial labour from Gielen’s paper The Art Scene Exploitation ) involved to produce the works.

It was a nice Saturday afternoon. At around 1 pm, there was suddenly an large influx of visitors came the gallery. Due to the limited nature of the gallery space, I felt like a host and had the urge coming up to the visitors and talk to them. (Took me a while to realize most gallery receptions don’t need to walk with visitor, I guess I made them feel intimidated) Surprisingly, Marina (my prof) visited with her friends, I was really excited to see her at the gallery! And I felt how the art scene is intertwining people from different projects/ galleries that people come across together. An old gentleman came in a bit later, the first question he asked was how much are these works. I handed him a descriptive booklet and he said he was interested in one of the painting. I told him that this painting was popular because many people said told me it’s their favourite of all. I figure that I can’t give him too much details regarding the concept nor the details, so I called Wil and let Wil explain to him. Turns out they were old friends, and Wil told me later that this gentlemen is WAAP’s loyal customer. We put the painting on hold for him after that phone call.

WAAP is the only commercial gallery in this class, and I feel really lucky to be assigned to WAAP. As my commerce minor background, I’m always interested in the how the business aspect functions in the art scene. This defiantly would a memorable experience. 

Artist Jeff Hallbauer:  http://www.jeffhallbauer.com/

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