Long time, no post.
I've been busy. Very busy. Very, very busy! Not only with finishing my dissertation, my final Art Creative Project and dealing with Artworks/Presentation & Promotion, but also with doing my bit to help organise our own, vaguely independent 4th year Digital Art Showcase.
Around a month ago, my fellow students and I were greeted with an unfortunate, perhaps even depressing reality. We were taken to the Centre for Contemporary Arts on Sauchiehall St. in Glasgow - a prestigious and highly sough after arts venue - and shown the space that UWS intended for us to exhibit all the work we've created this year. I use the term "space" very loosely, as there was precious little of it on show.
The room they'd booked, Gallery 5, perhaps the smallest gallery space in the entire building, was far too small to accommodate even a quarter of the work we have spent all year slaving away over. It had served them very well when there were perhaps only six or seven Honours' Students on the Digital Art programme, but when it came to accommodating the work of almost thirty, it was found to be sadly lacking, especially in light of the University's encouragement to "go big" with our art.
Very shortly after viewing the space at the CCA, we reached the collective decision to find a more suitable exhibition space, independently of UWS, and put on the show ourselves. Mary Pettigrew, a student in the class, very much took the reins of this task, and became the driving force behind our efforts, managing to exceed our most optimistic expectations and obtaining a two-week FREE residency at The Lighthouse, another prestigious Glasgow Art & Design venue. More than that, she secured us a residency in Gallery One, which is perhaps the largest gallery space in the entire building, occupying around three quarters of the first floor of the building. As you can imagine, we were overjoyed at this development.
There is, however, a sting in the tail of this happy event. The Lighthouse insisted on exclusivity of all artworks being displayed at the exhibition, which meant we could no longer even consider exhibiting within the main UWS Showcase event at the Centre for Contemporary Arts. This meant that we had to notify the University of our withdrawal from said event, a development they did not initially react positively to. The Academic staff were very supportive of our decision, but the managerial staff were more sceptical, wondering if we were capable of delivering a show of a suitably professional level to represent the University to the general public.
We stuck tour guns as a group, despite UWS's initial reservations, and eventually managed to bring them round to our way of thinking, as we'd managed to secure a vastly more suitable gallery space at little or no additional expense to the University. Unfortunately, there's another "but" coming - due to the University already having paid for the booking of the gallery space at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, there was little or no money left in their budget with which to offer us any form of financial support, although they were willing to offer us limited technical support and guidance in the staging of an exhibition of this scale.
Now that we're reaching the very tail end of our time at University, and our final hand-in is drawing ever closer, thoughts have turned towards the staging of the show itself, who to invite, how to invite them, and how to get our message across to the general public. The Lighthouse have very kindly offered to print us a number of free posters to publicise the event, although these posters' design is still subject to UWS approval to make sure it fits in with their corporate guidelines on branding and the use of the University's logo - all pretty dry, boring stuff to be honest. We had a very productive meeting this morning, during which we decided the fairest way to curate the exhibition and select which artworks are shown, should any decisions need to be made, is through the formation of a curation panel, comprised of four students (myself included) and two lecturers, who between them have a considerable number of years' experience of staging shows of this magnitude.
I've also been put forward to be the lead person for marketing and communicating our
message to the press, which is rather scary, but I've already drawn up a list of local newspapers to contact, and will be getting in touch with the UWS press officer in order to use his extensive list of contacts to further distribute our message to the four corners of West Central Scotland.
Finally, some bumph about the show itself:
"Digital Renaissance - a celebration of the work of some of the freshest, most exciting emerging artists, animators, designers, and filmmakers. A wide ranging selection of innovative and creative artworks, both digital and traditional, will be on display, including: animation, illustration, sculpture, photography, typography, interactive new media, painting, 2D & 3D animation and much, much more. This is one Degree show you won't want to miss!"
The show opens with an invitation only gala preview event on Thursday the 26th of May at 6pm, and will be open and available to the general public from 10am on Friday the 27th of May until 5.30pm on Saturday the 4th of June, at:
Gallery One,
The Lighthouse,
11 Mitchell Lane (just off Buchanan St),
Glasgow
G1 3NU.
Tel. 0141 276 5360
You can find more information on both the show itself, the artists, and the art being shown at the website, which is http://www.digitalrenaissance.org.uk, on Facebook by searching for Digital Renaissance, or on Twitter, by following @digirenaissance.
