{"id":51,"date":"2013-02-09T00:00:43","date_gmt":"2013-02-09T00:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/?p=51"},"modified":"2020-05-10T18:51:23","modified_gmt":"2020-05-10T18:51:23","slug":"future-perfect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/2013\/02\/09\/future-perfect\/","title":{"rendered":"Future Perfect"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With: Asylumarchive, Gemma Browne, Fiona Chambers, Carol Anne Connolly, Paul Doherty, Mark Durkan, John Gayer, Raine Hozier Byrne, Moze Jacobs, Myra Jago, Bartosz Kolata, Eoin Mac Lochlainn, Shelly McDonnell, Ian McInerney, Caroline McNally, Lorraine Neeson, Bl\u00e1thnaid N\u00ed Mhurch\u00fa, Thomas O’Brien, Tadhg \u00d3 Cuirr\u00edn, Peter O’Kennedy, Fergus O’Neill, Ethna O’Regan, Lynda Phelan, Ben Sloat, Chris Timms, Chanelle Walshe, and Lee Welch.
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane<\/a>
December 2012 \u2013 January 2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future and the lack of has been cited as the basis for a number of exhibitions in Ireland and Europe in the last year. Ideas concerning the Modernist project, Idealism and Utopia from a post-Post-Modern position have come into common circulation amongst artists. But can we still envision a future? Using the grammatical classification of Future Perfect as a starting point and as a play on words, artists were asked to submit work or proposals that investigate or respond to all of the aforementioned ideas. This will (ideally!) include political, philosophical, aesthetic, and historical concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artists in all mediums (including performance and painting) were invited to submit work and proposals for work for an exhibition at the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, Gallery 8. The submission fee was \u20ac2 and had to be paid with a \u20ac2 coin. There were no form letters, i.e. all applicants received personalised rejection or acceptance correspondence. Work was chosen based on its feasibility, artistic quality and its relevance to the theme. The exhibition was adjudicated by Jim Ricks as impartially as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Future Perfect<\/em> was developed under the umbrella of the Sleepwalkers project in the Hugh Lane. Sleepwalkers involves 6 invited artists, the gallery\u2019s exhibitions curators, a collective experimental phase grounded in Institutional Critique in Gallery 8, and solo shows. As part of my part in \u201cexperiments in exhibition making\u201d I have chosen to curate an exhibition in the space. I utilised an open submission process for a variety of reasons. It, on one hand, introduces the curator, myself, to artists and works I wouldn\u2019t normally or previously haven\u2019t encountered. It works in the spirit of generosity by providing a democratised agency for artists in an esteemed institution. It also serves as an experiment, examining and testing the well-know institutional structure of the open submission itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The submission process I set up was integral in relation to this last point. Artists in all mediums (including performance and painting) were invited to submit work and proposals for work. I asked for 140 character <\/em>proposals either via email or Twitter. These could contain links and\/or images. And I required a single \u20ac2 coin to be sent via post directly to me as the processing fee. Indeed it is all somewhat arbitrary. I suppose that is exactly the point in a kind of absurdist farcical parody kind of way. As I suspected, and later discovered, in this regard artists are \u2018well\u2013trained\u2019 so to speak. As I began to receive submissions and the posted processing fee, I delighted in the wide\u2013ranging, yet always very human, engagement that unfolded. The post in particular included gifts, jokes, a range of solutions to ensuring the safe delivery of the \u20ac2 coin, and of course the correspondence was almost always hand\u2013written. My response to this was to invoke a \u2018No Form Letter Policy\u2019, i.e. I replied with my decision to all applicants individually, albeit concisely. I received numerous responses, a few bad, most good and many further explanations about the submitted work. In a few cases I requested other work or to use the objects mailed in the post. In one instance I requested the use of the artist\u2019s handwriting for the exhibition press image. The point being that dialogues began, there was exchange, feedback, a response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Work was chosen based on its feasibility, artistic quality and its relevance to the theme. But, mainly when choosing the work I intentionally placed concept before form; rational adherence to my brief prevailed over craftsmanship and other aesthetic or stylistic concerns. Specifically, what I posited was a request for artists to envision the future and by no means sought prescriptive utopianism. There is the all too frequent nostalgia for past conceptions of the future visible in art today, indeed it is arguably the current zeitgeist. Loose applications, \u201cnotions of\u201d, poetic interpretations, or exceedingly generous understandings of work were all rejected. I was willing to allow new interpretations to occur and unfold without imposing literal limitations, so long as the artists resolved the proposed brief I would take on the range of solutions regardless of \u2018superficial\u2019 matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although striving for impartiality and objectivity, I accept that this is my subjective curatorial imposition. It is in this, the dialogues I initiated with the artists, and the selection of non-submitted works that I hope to impact culture through exhibition making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to everyone at the Hugh Lane and the Sleepwalkers project. Special thanks to Michael Dempsey.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With: Asylumarchive, Gemma Browne, Fiona Chambers, Carol Anne Connolly, Paul Doherty, Mark Durkan, John Gayer, Raine Hozier Byrne, Moze Jacobs, Myra Jago, Bartosz Kolata, Eoin Mac Lochlainn, Shelly McDonnell, Ian McInerney, Caroline McNally, Lorraine Neeson, Bl\u00e1thnaid N\u00ed Mhurch\u00fa, Thomas O’Brien, Tadhg \u00d3 Cuirr\u00edn, Peter O’Kennedy, Fergus O’Neill, Ethna O’Regan, Lynda Phelan, Ben Sloat, Chris Timms, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibitions","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233,"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimricks.info\/jrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}