Last Thursday I helped Veronica prepare for her collaborative gallery show "Laughing in the Face of..." At 7: 45 am I took the subway to the Spring Garden stop and walked to 12th Street. I was immediately put to work when I arrived. I rolled out rugs on the platform where the band would later perform. I then touched up the walls with white paint. Meanwhile Veronica was trying to adjust the projector screens to fit the walls. Every few minutes more and more artists started to arrive with their pieces. Each one had very specific requirements for displaying their work, from how the light was cast on them to the kind of hooks used to hang their canvases. I helped Sally Eckhoff bring in her supplies for her ravioli toilet installation. I found out she also studied at University of the Arts and told me about her past experiences living in the mountains and her artistic process. Later I was sent outside to hang up more flyers, I had quite a few people walking by ask about the show and where it would be.
The most important thing I learned from this experience was to prepare the technology ahead of time when possible. One of the tasks I had was to burn a DVD of one of the video projects. Initially it seemed like an easy task, but as it turned out, there were a lot of complications. We had two computers on us and one of them didn't have a working disk drive and the other didn't have a proper disc burning program. In the end we had to download a program that would burn the DVD. Also the DVD player we had was jamming so none of the DVDs worked. It took a lot of shaking and banging to get it to play correctly.
Despite some technological difficulties, I really enjoyed setting up the gallery. It's rewarding to start out in an empty room and slowly watch it come to life as more and more art fills the voids.
The poster and map for the gallery by CHER's Jessie Clark
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