Project: Gallery Tour Year: 2001 Artist: Claudia Ulisses
Gallery Tour is a journey into the empty interior of some art galleries or museums (art spaces), where the visitor is literally transported by a chair that moves through the space. The visitor is at once the observer and the observed, the participant and the object by it self, being represented.
Moving along a wall and along the irregular surfaces renders the modeling experience of the space more intimate. The appropriation of the site is established at a sensory level, thus affective… The result is the unity of the elements. They interact with each other; belong to one another in a reciprocal fashion. The space and the architecture becomes the focus of apprehension, an isolated block, a sculpture, diluting from within its main function as a receptacle for temporary exhibitions.
Gallery Tour emphasizes the notion of the gallery as geography of personal experience, a private experience, temporarily distinguishing it from its intentionally neutral existence, when exhibiting artwork.
Only some people attend galleries. These are spaces reserved to a select and specific type of visitor, as opposed to guided touristic tours, which are rituals for the masses…
For this project, I was seduced by the fact that, starting in the 1990s, a large number of art galleries revamped their spaces, opting for auteur-style architecture and drawing upon the aesthetic languages of contemporary design and architecture to give them a sense of identity and a particular status. This phenomenon occurred around the same time as the boom in artistic production and the revival of the market for visual arts – particularly in the case of art that strongly linked architecture and design, with the many areas of artistic production – and the ‘rise’ of architecture and design as references for cutting-edge work and contemporary aesthetic trends in some of the cultural capitals’ most sophisticated cultural circles.
As an artist and observer, while visiting some galleries, I often felt the urge to imagine them empty (also inspired by the beauty of some of the spaces) and have an intimate experience with the space, a performative relationship between my body and the architecture.
G. T. is also a “rebellious” reaction to some of the overproduction of art / exhibitions, art as a "distinct" mass culture … Gallery Tour once again locates irony in the role of the work of art and its status, proposing a playful yet critical perspective on cultural consumption habits and the artistic sphere, while at the same time on the categories of nominating the artistic object, in its authority over and alongside other aesthetic associations.
Throughout my career I have produced several projects that, such as Gallery Tour, have not yet been realized. G. T. was one of the first (2001). It is a tribute to architecture, as also to spaces of galleries and museums as bastions of creativity. Beyond all these points, given the actual international economic and political scenario which also has affected the culture of art, I see G. T. as a metaphor, "un certain regard melancolique " but inquisitive, face to the art spaces and their future, those bastions of human existence, which may still be allowed to use (as a retreat) to, privately, breathe, meditate, look and feel...
(Optional: In a separate room several slides will be projected, concerning an archive of images of empty art spaces, from all over the world.)
Claudia Ulisses
Claudia Ulisses is a multimedia artist. She lives and works in New York
Contact: Mobile: + 1 3475155200 claudiaulisses@gmail.com itakap@gmail.com info.claudiaulisses@gmail.com
Project: Gallery Tour Year: 2001 Artist: Claudia Ulisses
Gallery Tour is a journey into the empty interior of some art galleries or museums (art spaces), where the visitor is literally transported by a chair that moves through the space. The visitor is at once the observer and the observed, the participant and the object by it self, being represented.
Moving along a wall and along the irregular surfaces renders the modeling experience of the space more intimate. The appropriation of the site is established at a sensory level, thus affective… The result is the unity of the elements. They interact with each other; belong to one another in a reciprocal fashion. The space and the architecture becomes the focus of apprehension, an isolated block, a sculpture, diluting from within its main function as a receptacle for temporary exhibitions.
Gallery Tour emphasizes the notion of the gallery as geography of personal experience, a private experience, temporarily distinguishing it from its intentionally neutral existence, when exhibiting artwork.
Only some people attend galleries. These are spaces reserved to a select and specific type of visitor, as opposed to guided touristic tours, which are rituals for the masses…
For this project, I was seduced by the fact that, starting in the 1990s, a large number of art galleries revamped their spaces, opting for auteur-style architecture and drawing upon the aesthetic languages of contemporary design and architecture to give them a sense of identity and a particular status. This phenomenon occurred around the same time as the boom in artistic production and the revival of the market for visual arts – particularly in the case of art that strongly linked architecture and design, with the many areas of artistic production – and the ‘rise’ of architecture and design as references for cutting-edge work and contemporary aesthetic trends in some of the cultural capitals’ most sophisticated cultural circles.
As an artist and observer, while visiting some galleries, I often felt the urge to imagine them empty (also inspired by the beauty of some of the spaces) and have an intimate experience with the space, a performative relationship between my body and the architecture.
G. T. is also a “rebellious” reaction to some of the overproduction of art / exhibitions, art as a "distinct" mass culture … Gallery Tour once again locates irony in the role of the work of art and its status, proposing a playful yet critical perspective on cultural consumption habits and the artistic sphere, while at the same time on the categories of nominating the artistic object, in its authority over and alongside other aesthetic associations.
Throughout my career I have produced several projects that, such as Gallery Tour, have not yet been realized. G. T. was one of the first (2001). It is a tribute to architecture, as also to spaces of galleries and museums as bastions of creativity. Beyond all these points, given the actual international economic and political scenario which also has affected the culture of art, I see G. T. as a metaphor, "un certain regard melancolique " but inquisitive, face to the art spaces and their future, those bastions of human existence, which may still be allowed to use (as a retreat) to, privately, breathe, meditate, look and feel...
(Optional: In a separate room several slides will be projected, concerning an archive of images of empty art spaces, from all over the world.)
Claudia Ulisses
Claudia Ulisses is a multimedia artist. She lives and works in New York
Contact: Mobile: + 1 3475155200 claudiaulisses@gmail.com itakap@gmail.com info.claudiaulisses@gmail.com