We had the first curation meeting for the Staff/Student Show the week before we broke up for Christmas, and it was a meeting where we just threw out ideas to see what people were interested in doing. My idea was very similar to that of Beth's where it would involve students choosing a tutor of a different discipline to them and to then have a tutorial with them or to create a work using the medium that said tutor uses, for example creating a sculpture based piece of work in line with Desmond or Sarah. The aim of my idea was to try and encourage students to play with mediums and move out of their comfort zone while they still have some sort of freedom to do so.
Other ideas that floated about were open tutorials, where it would be a collaboration with the tutors and the tutorial would lead to something being made, staff run workshops to encourage students to try something new, observing tutors working in the workshops and having students responding to what they see. We finally came up with an idea of having one of the project spaces being used an exhibition space for the tutors work, and having students create a piece of work using materials that we give them and then display that piece in another project space. We then discussed what kinds of materials we could include in this 'box' and tried to create our own Bauhaus hierarchy of materials.
However we came across an issue with this idea in that we felt that there was too much going on, and that it was essentially two different shows that didn't really relate to one another and would be difficult to market as one. So we met up again later in the week to reassess ideas to see what we could do. We did like the idea of having staff show work in the project spaces, and from there we discussed the idea of the learning curve, and how as artists we come across pieces that are turning points in our practices, so we decided on playing with this idea and came up with the idea of 'Curve' where staff and students would submit pieces of work that they felt were turning points in their practice. We felt that this idea worked really well and would be really simple to market and curate.
We decided to set the deadline to the 14th of January, so we had a couple of weeks to advertise the show, curate works, and liaise with artists exhibiting and to be able organise the opening event as well as any other events scheduled throughout the show. We are very aware of how we want the events to be set up as we had a schedule of events lined up in the interim show but there wasn't as much student engagement as we would have liked or we predicted so we want to keep the events simple and engaging to encourage students to be proactive.
We also discussed roles that we wanted to do this time round, I volunteered with marketing again, but solely on the instagram, as well as helping with documentation as I had enjoyed helping document Beth's work previous and enjoy taking photographs. Beth and Aurelia are to organise marketing both physical and online, and will pass on the things I need to upload by certain dates, Sophie and Oliver are to liaise with tutors and artists, and Rosie is to help with organising the opening event as well helping with the other roles. We are all trying something a little different this time round to make it fair, while also keeping with what we have the most interest in, in terms of curation.
An idea for events that we suggested was having mini talks from the tutors, some one day and some another, as we felt that students wouldn't pass up on the opportunity to learn something about their tutor, I also suggested having mini crits of the staff's work, much like how the staff crit our work on display, to challenge this idea of hierarchy. Additionally we have discussed having a quiz night, and other fun events.
Furthermore, we also discussed logo designs and decided to go with Rosie's hand drawn design of a curve with a black background. We thought this looked really interesting, and to place it on a poster and postcard with the events on the back. This would be a much smaller ad campaign than the Interim show as we have less time to advertise and organise works. Furthermore, we also discussed the idea of screen printing the posters, rather than digitally printing them, to keep in line with the hand drawn theme and I volunteered to help out with that as I have a lot of experience in screen printing.
Overall, we still have a lot to discuss, but everything seems to be falling into place and now it is just a case of receiving all of the submissions, updating everyone on any plan changes and going forward with the curation.