Drive Thru’: A Collaboration with Stephen Clarke

Aaron Tonks

Rationale

Covid-related lockdowns affected many exhibiting artists as galleries and exhibition venues were forced to close. They were forced to find alternative internet-based platforms to exhibit their work and often without the benefit of a curator. These platforms varied from webpages to immersive virtual gallery spaces. However, there were many artists who did not have a web presence, either by choice or didn’t have the knowledge (or confidence) to create one. Stephen Clarke, an artist and lecturer, based at the University of Chester, was one such person.

Stephen’s photography project, ‘Alien Resident’ was exhibited at CASC Gallery, Chester over lockdown and was subsequently closed to the public. This led me to approach him and propose a collaboration as a way of providing public access to his photographs and gave me the chance to respond to his work and design, build and curate a bespoke virtual gallery for it.

This collaboration also allowed me to re-examine the traditionally fractious relationship between the artist and curator through the lens of new technology.

Artist/curator relationships have been well documented as being quite rocky. Indeed leading curators and critics such as Jeffrey Kipnis often warn against including artists in the active process of curation and design of their exhibitions - ‘a show… I understood to be selected and installed by the artist - a risky adventure, in my opinion, as the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client’ (Kipnis, 2016). The reasons for this source of friction are, says Robert Storr ‘that some artists are very good, flexible, and creative… Quite a few are not, but only some of them are aware of it. (Storr, 2016).

Storr goes on to correctly identify the gallery space as another point of friction, that the curator takes the (hard learned) idiosyncrasies of the site into consideration during planning, whereas an artist cannot necessarily make the best decisions for placing their artworks because they are rarely immersed within the exhibition space.

VR however, is a fairly new exhibition medium and the ability to make a new space, ‘where the audience can see works of art and have an art experience’ (Jacob, 2016), has created a new environment where the traditional norms may not manifest in the same way.

Methodology

After discussing the project and showing Stephen examples of virtual galleries, he sent to me a series of 11 photographs, made during an extended visit to San Diego in 1986 - 1987, that depicted a suburban car-based lifestyle. He left the gallery design and layout completely up to me.

The photographs were an unusual mix of seven suburban street views and four car portraits. This odd balance of images may not necessarily have sat happily in a traditional wall-hung gallery. However, a virtual gallery does not have to follow conventional rules and I had the chance to create a space which helps to make sense of the work.

I created a large airy space and placed the suburban pictures on large panels framed between equally large windows and I placed the car portraits in smaller, warmer, individual human-sized spaces. I tried to emulate structures, textures and colours that I felt were iconic of San Diego. For example, I used dark wood edging, cream-toned vertical panelling, and grey (aluminium) window frames which appear to be quite popular design features within commercial buildings in San Diego and are reflected in the photographs. Unusually for this gallery, I made the decision to include windows and create a monochromatic facsimile of San Diego’s surrounding landscape.

Stephen and I had three meetings supplemented with weekly updates throughout the collaboration process. We discussed my design, the light, the landscape, architectural features, and the order and size of the images. From this Stephen was able to write an introduction where, in an analogy to the creation of my gallery in the virtual landscape, he compares himself to Mr Natural a Robert Crumb character who enters into a deep meditation in an empty desert, where under blazing sun, ‘...a road is rolled out, a car passes and then a town emerges. In the midst of passing traffic, Mr Natural sits in front of a Denny’s Diner where, eventually, a cop tries to move him on’from nothing to something.