I am more than a year behind on these posts so I am going to cheat a little bit and draw from my wife Ellen's text from the gallery guide for the first exhibition she solo curated at Cassilhaus Gallery called Exquisite Corpse.
Exhibition ideas often organically present themselves. In 2016 our friend Diana Gaston, the Executive Director of the Tamarind Institute, a fine art press in Albuquerque, New Mexico, let us know about a portfolio of eighteen lithographic prints from her press entitled Exquisite Corpse. Over a period of fifteen years, Tamarind visiting artists waiting “on press” to finish their main editions were invited to participate in a game of exquisite corpse by creating renderings of heads, torsos, or legs without knowledge of what other collaborating artists were producing.We were entranced and added the prints to our collection. The moment they arrived I knew we needed to do a show.
Exquisite Corpse (or, Cadavre Exquis) was a Surrealists’ parlour game in which players write or draw in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of their writing or drawing, and then pass it on to the next player for a further contribution.The name is derived from one round of the game that resulted in the nonsensical phrase, Le cadaver exquis boira le vin nouveau,“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” Since its beginning, artists, as well as writers, have drawn from the concept of the game to create collaborative and fantastical drawings, poetry, and prose.
The Tamarind portfolio is a variant of the game and inspired me to mine our own collection to unearth hidden “corpses" for this 2017 exhibition. The Cassilhaus Collection is portrait heavy and I was able to look at each piece with fresh eyes. It was a delightful challenge to find correlations and juxtapositions, in content, tone, and form to create full sets that force us to look again at familiar images with new meaning. Needless to say the artists were not complicit in this activity!
I use this great collection software called Recollector to keep track of our art collection and one of its features is to be able to do extensive subsetting and to print very flexible reports. Ellen and I went through the collection to select possible pieces for inclusion in the exhibition, I printed her a custom report, and then she started the fun of pairing the pieces into exquisite corpses.
When I set out to hang the 18 piece portfolio we wanted them to "float" off the wall rather than use conventional framing and we wanted to use magnets so as not to damage the pieces themselves. It took about three trips to Home Depot to find just the right combo of hardware and super strong magnets to pull it off.
Groupings ranged from 2-5 pieces with most being pretty literal but several were quite abstracted. It was a ton of fun to get reacquainted with these works in these crazy new contexts. You can download the Gallery Guide to check out all of the combinations. Download Exquisite+Corpse+Gallery+Guide(1)
Ellen gave a short curator's talk at the opening and had set up a "make your own exquisite corpse" station in advance in the Girl Power Room encouraging everyone to participate and add their work to the dedicated guest exhibition area and riff off other visitors.
Also in the Girl Power room for this exhibition was a very small show of the work of collaborative artists Mercedes Jelenek and Jess Rees. It was a wonderful complement to the exhibition theme. Again Ellen from the guide:
While in the planning stages of this show we visited The Penland School of Crafts in western North Carolina and discovered the collaborative work of Mercedes Jelinek and Jess Rees. Their ‘conversations,' as they call them, start with scouting and visiting locations together. Mercedes then makes a series of images and sends a selection of printed photographs to Jess to choose from. Jess and Mercedes continue to pass the photos back and forth, now beginning to remove parts of the images and adding new details in their own ways.The resulting photographs have many layers of acrylic paint to conceal parts of the photo, as well as gold leaf additions to bring attention to particular architectural elements left within the frame. This volleying continues until both are satisfied with the final print—creating a different sort of exquisite corpse.
(Jess and Mercedes at the opening)
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