Exhibitions

February 14 – June 14, 2009
Morgan Anderson Gallery and Corridor Gallery

P. Iannarelli, This Land Is Your Land And This Land Is My Land, 2007........Indonesian female torso, n.d.

This exhibition presents objects from the SDMA permanent collection displayed in a variety of groupings. Each of these groupings is designed to provide new perspectives on the works displayed and to draw attention to the strategies that museums use to present and contextualize objects. Groupings to be displayed include portfolios of related works by single artists and artist groups, unrelated works by an individual artist, works in similar media, size, or other formal characteristics, disparate works that depict or address similar locations or topics, and, shifting from the connoisseurship-based to the instititutional/critical mode, works that the institution stores together, works that have occupied the same gallery location over time, works acquired simultaneously or from the same donor, and objects not normally seen together in museums that nonetheless share common purpose or value across or within cultures.

Sofo Teshigahara, Clouds, 1963-4.........................Ben Bishop, The Birthday Party, 1968

.....While emphasizing the breadth and depth of the SDMA collection, this exhibition underscores the interdisciplinary power of the museum institution as teaching tool by underscoring the dynamic between isolated artwork and institutional context that in many ways defines the challenges and opportunties confronting today’s museum. Stuart Henley initiated this project in early 2008 by discussing critical design theory-based museum projects with SDMA curator Brian Wallace. Henley and Wallace determined that an interdisciplinary approach to such an experimental project would allow for structured but focused inquiry: Anne Galperin, Gregory Bray, David Appelbaum, and Yoav Kaddar agreed to participate in the exhibition, and, during the summer and fall of 2008, the group developed an exhibition that consists of separate but related components. The exhibition is organized by SDMA curator Brian Wallace with SUNY New Paltz faculty David Appelbaum (Philosophy), Gregory Bray (Communications and Media), Anne Galperin (Graphic Design), Yoav Kaddar (Theatre), and independent designer and theorist Stuart Henley (Bath, England).

.....Anne Galperin performed extensive analysis of the museum’s collection database and, in particular, the categories of information contained within that database. She was interested in the cultural biases and informational ambiguities behind the attribution of so many works in the collection to “unknown” makers, and decided to exhibit one work from every country represented in the collection by an unknown artist or artisan.

.....Gregory Bray addressed the disparity at this and all museums between works in storage and works on view. Working with museum staff to gather information and images pertaining to the collection and to past exhibitions, Bray and his students produced four video artworks that explore—and depict—the complexity of the nested decisions that produce exhibitions and define collections.

.....David Applebaum—like Galperin, eschewing traditional connoisseurship- based selection processes—also worked with the museum’s collection database, performing a structured series of random selections from the collection and producing a provocatively coherent-seeming exhibition that probes basic ideas about judgment, preference, and subjectivity.

Stuart Henley, Lightcans, 2009...........................Hydraulic lift, 2009 (study for installation project)

.....Stuart Henley made and modified several exhibition proposals addressing the perception of the value of objects and museums before deciding to organize a display of museum lighting fixtures and lifting tools meant to draw attention to the strategies with which museums—and their commercial analogs, department stores—highlight the objects they display.

.....Sharing the view that behavior and movement in public spaces like museums has fundamental connections to the activities and concerns of contemporary performers, Yoav Kaddar and Brian Wallace discussed the interface of performance and visual art and jointly invited Pittsburgh-based Attack Theatre to develop and present an in-the- museum work in late March that, like recent Attack Theatre projects at the Carnegie International and elsewhere, would incorporate aspects of the exhibition—ranging from objects on display to viewer movements—into the performance.

.....Wallace, curious about the criteria we use to compare objects, chose pairs of objects from the collection that represent the categories of information often used to discuss and organize exhibitions and collections.