What May Be
Host / Curator: Justin Marsh
Artist: Donna Chung
Justin Marsh has had a fair amount of curatorial experience, primarily with respect to the exhibition space, Twelfth and Taylor, which he has carved out of his private residence. These tend to be one-night events combining aspects of an art opening, a house concert and a party. Justin chose to work with Donna Chung, because he felt that his art community, the regular organizers and attendees of Twelfth and Taylor events, would benefit from exposure to her approach to art making.
Going into her first visit with Justin, Donna did not expect the formal considerations of a gallery to be one of her challenges in the context of this exhibition. Before her visit, Justin worked with the curatorial committee responsible for programming the space at Twelfth and Taylor to clear the calendar for Donna’s work. However, this was not at all what Donna had in mind, and she struggled with a solution that would take in to account the whole situation embodied by the house, including the tension between its residential character and the public events that it hosts. The friction between satisfying Justin’s expectations that she think of the space as a gallery and her own desires to work outside of that construct seemed at first to be insoluble. Donna described feeling “like a two headed llama trying to go in different directions.”
The artist decided to orient her work towards the experience of visiting with Justin and seeing the residence’s Twelfth and Taylor persona through slide shows on Justin’s computer. The intimacy of this gesture evoked the dual nature of the house, at once formal exhibition space and casual living space. In order to address these two aspects of the space, Donna concluded that the gallery should be programmed as normal, and she would not consider herself to be a part of that show. Instead, her work will reflect, through her own lens, the combination of people and uses that the residence serves.