What is The Distributed Exhibition?
The Distributed Exhibition arose from a desire to mount an exhibition of works requiring a more personal viewing experience, one that requires a one-to-one interaction. I wanted to confront the participants with the questions:
What might happen when artwork is created for a particular person, family, or living situation? What if private work-spaces and residences became formal places of display? What if the occupants became curators? What if the viewers became guests?
Eleven separate sites are participating in the exhibition: four residential, six workplaces, and space with a foot in both camps. The people hosting the work and providing the sites to which the artists were asked respond also serve as the curators of their space. They selected the artist with whom they were most interested in working. After the initial introduction, the nature of this relationship has been primarily up to the individual artists and host-curators to define. Some have stuck with a more traditional curatorial structure while others have formed something more akin to a collaboration.
This experience began as something similar to a blind date for the artists. They each had the challenge of working within and responding to a predetermined set of conditions that they did not choose for themselves. Each of the artists rose to the challenge, but they all responded quite differently. For many artists, this exhibition has been an opportunity to try a new approach to their practice of art making, because the inherent qualities of their site demanded a different set of responses than the spaces in which they have previously chosen to work.
For the majority of projects, prospective viewers must make an appointment through the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in order to see them. Because the works in this exhibition do not all dwell under the same roof and take place in spaces not publicly accessible, viewers might see the exhibition in a couple of ways. Some people may look through the project archives for each of the eleven sites at the San Jose ICA and decide to schedule a time to see the work. Others might encounter one of the artworks while visiting or doing business with one of the host-curators. This publication is designed to provide more context for each project in terms of the unique situation from which they emerged, and also present an opportunity for relationships between the individual works to emerge.
– Sara Thacher,
Exhibition Producer