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When senior art student Chikako Araki was awarded the gallery space in the Thomson Honors Center, she wasn’t sure how she would fill it.
“This was supposed to be a solo show,” Araki said. “But then I realized that I have this wall until December, and I wanted to do something fun.”
She batted around ideas with her peers about how to approach the space, and together they came up with the idea to do a collaborative show.
“It’s not a typical show,” Araki said. “It’s creating an art show together with a circle of friends.”
Dozens of art works decorate the first floor of Colvin Hall, but not all of them are from the same artist – or even people who call themselves “artists.” As she was planning the show, Araki asked several of her friends and peers if they would like to contribute a piece. Those friends who contribute in turn ask friends of their own to “borrow” a piece. The invited friends frame, label and hang their 2-D artworks together.
“You’re supposed to – your friends and you – come yourself to hang the art works,” Araki said. “The purpose of doing this is to create a show together. So, not only do you provide the artwork, but also you’re going to make a label, come here to hang it, and because you have to physically come here, you have to look around the show, so in a way, you become viewers too.”
Araki describes the show, titled the “Borrowed Art” exhibit, an “open-process” experiment. Every two or three months, with “no strict set dates,” the friend’s friend will invite an acquaintance of his or her own to replace the artwork of the first friend.
“Usually in a show, the curator has more control,” Araki said. “My purpose is to just let it go and to see what happens. So I don’t jury, and I don’t say who is your friend or not, just that everything is open.”
Participants in the show come from many different backgrounds. One friend, senior art major Constance Paviliska, chose a painting by her 11-year-old niece, Adrienne Pish.
“She and I have been exchanging art for a long while,” Paviliska said. “I have art in my studios that she’s done for me, and she liked my painting before anybody else did.”
Art history major Elizabeth Pelletier chose a musical composition by her friend and music education major Chandra Cooper. Since the gallery piece has to be two-dimensional, the friends framed a copy of the sheet music.
“I thought it would be something different,” Pelletier said. “There’s nothing else like it in the gallery.”
The focus of the show is to encourage people to see different ways of creating and participating in art exhibitions, Araki said.
“I’m hoping that traditional, exclusive exhibition spaces, such as museums, would consider from time to time, to open and invite ‘public participations’ by experimenting with art shows like this one,” she wrote in the artists statement. “I think it encourages local people, ‘artist’ and ‘non-artist’ alike to become participants, not just audiences.”
“Borrowed Art” will be on display in the Thomson Honors Center at Colvin Hall through Dec. 7, 2007.
Bangor Daily News