Earlier this week, the Samek Art Gallery highlighted an article on our Facebook page from Tribeca Citizen. Three New Yorkers: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, and Alex Kalman of the collaborative Red Bucket Films, unveiled “Museum” in TriBeCa.
Museum, located at 368 Broadway (now here’s where things get interesting) is the building’s converted freight elevator! Displaying objects from around the world, each work is paired with a story of its past. Dialing a toll-free number and entering the object’s code, assigned on individual wall labels, allow viewers to hear the histories and origins of each common object. Each unique story disrupts the perceived commonality of the objects making them not so, well, uncommon anymore.
Our Director, Rick Rinehart shared a vision alike Red Bucket Films. If the common spaces and objects of the world really are the extraordinary grounds where art, audience, and life interact… well, then that’s something worth exploring. Although the Samek Art Gallery is closed for the summer, we are creatively exploring new to bring the arts outside of gallery boarders. Earlier this year, the Samek debuted the wall space directly outside of our main entrance as site to activate media arts. The Video Wall, a hallway turned mini-theatre, has been activated as a site of display.
What attracted me to this story was how Museum questions the role of traditional exhibition spaces. Furthermore, how might our everyday surroundings set the stage for alternative art displays? Rather than continuing to challenge the “white cube” I thought it interesting to explore ways in which we as museum professionals can embrace our common spaces and shine new light on their potentials. It is within these common spaces: freight elevators, or in the Samek’s case a simply wall, that we unveil the uncommon and give art a stage on which to shine.
Currently on view, the Video Wall at the Samek Art Gallery highlights Bay Area artist, Artist Tracey Snelling as she too explores the common in her short film, Nothing. The short film documents the life of plain Jane; a young hotel maid who has fallen into a life of routine. Day in and day out she wakes up in the arms of a man who doesn’t love her, and works a job she doesn’t enjoy. On the outside she appears common woman of routine. Perhaps her only pleasure comes from trying on patron’s clothes of from the room she cleans, dreaming of the uncommon- a life of excitement.
I encourage you to take a moment and pay attention to the spaces that we would not commonly observe. Find a new way to each of these places to activate a new perspective… a new uncommon.
The Video Wall is located on the 3rd Floor of the Elaine Langone Center, Bucknell University.
For more on Nothing visit: Nothingthefilm.com
For more on Museum visit: TribecaCitizen