When I first heard about this project it sounded very large scale; I would be helping directly with the new exhibition in Presentation’s House’s new space. The meeting was a bit of a curveball as my supervisor was not at the gallery that day–last minute emergency–so I was debriefed by someone else, but the meeting was still very informative. I’ll have a smaller role; my project consists of making talking points for the exhibition and the artworks in it so that future gallery docents have a quick way to understand the exhibit and know what to tell visitors about it. I’ll will be doing research to fulfill the project. It is still a large project: from the looks of it, this will be quite a spectacular show with many artists; it’ll be a lot of reading.

It also plays a large part in the work the gallery is trying to do. As a public institution it aims to educate the public on art and help them learn and think about what they are seeing. This document I’ll be creating will be directly used by people working at the gallery, information to be disseminated to the general public as well. It’ll be the first step to teaching people about the exhibition, again for both docents and visitors, which is very important. On that point, it’s quite a bit to live up to. In the end though, it is a pretty straightforward project.

At the moment, the artists to be included in the exhibition have not been fully confirmed. I will start with focusing on the confirmed artists (fortunately, these artists are very well known so finding information about them won’t be too hard). Also, because the exhibition’s theme is highly connected to North Vancouver, where the gallery is, I’ll also be learning more about the history of North Vancouver at the same time to inform how I write about the exhibited artworks. This will be accomplished my, again, my own research and reading documents supplied to me by the gallery. I will also be using the information given to me by the curators and, again, supplied documents to understand the vision of the exhibition, how they are trying to frame it, to again inform how I write about the artworks.

Currently, a deadline has been set for October 12th to finish the currently confirmed artists and artworks; the project deadline is November 18th, the opening of the exhibition. Hopefully by that time I can meet up with my supervisors again (my supervisor is the assistant curator, though she is currently out at the moment and has been substituted by someone else helping her with the exhibition) to figure out who else I will have to look at. I am trying to model how I do this project on my experience working at the Belkin Gallery at UBC. Over the summer, I similarly did research on artists in upcoming exhibitions and had to write about them. I will use the skills I learned from this experience (e.g. knowing where to look, how to find, resources available for what you’re looking for when researching) for this project. We have set up that I will be coming in every Thursday and possibly some Tuesdays as well.  As most people at the gallery seem very busy–I believe they are organizing their upcoming auction–I’ll will try my best to check in once in awhile, ask questions and ask about how feedback will work (communicate with them through email with necessary) to help me complete my project to their standards.