New gallery gives SPACE for curator’s art

“Behind Our Scenes”

SPACE Gallery

812 Liberty Ave.

Dec. 11 through Feb…. “Behind Our Scenes”

SPACE Gallery

812 Liberty Ave.

Dec. 11 through Feb. 13

Tuesday-Thursday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday-Saturday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Free

A precise and final stroke of the brush, a last click of the mouse and a few quick swipes with the eraser. The artist steps back from her work. She nods her head and smiles with satisfaction. The piece is finally complete — the work is done.

But for the curators, installers and attendees who make possible the displays that patrons and art enthusists enjoy, the work has only just begun.

“Behind Our Scenes,” the latest exhibit at SPACE gallery, takes the visions of those typically working in the wings and thrusts them into the spotlight.

“Behind Our Scenes” hopes to give backstage artists the chance to show off and get some recognition for their own work.

The exhibit features creations from art installers to curators and customer service representatives of six prominent Pittsburgh art venues, including The Mattress Factory, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Wood Street Galleries, of which SPACE is a constituent.

The pieces on display range from drawings and paintings to photography and new media installations.

Chris Korch, an attendee and installer at the Wood Street Galleries known to the art community as “Slinky,” is one of the artists responsible for “Behind Our Scenes.

Korch contributed three pieces to the exhibit. One of these is a collection of traffic signs titled “Street Art.”

“This piece is the opposite of art that people create in the streets,” Korch said. “I’m taking the quote unquote ‘art’ from the streets and bringing it into the gallery.”

Also fashioned by Korch is a series of origami called “It Never Comes True.” Organized into two squares on the floor, one large and one small, Korch created a sea of crisp white “fortune-tellers,” as he described them.

“We used to make these when we were kids, and the fortunes were always about who you were going to marry and things like that. It’s called ‘It Never Comes True’ because none of the predictions made ever came true,” Korch said. “This piece is sort of about unrequited love, if you will.”

The final piece by Korch is a sculpture created from empty CD jewel cases that Korch, a part-time disc jockey, had available. The cases are stacked and hung to create an overall impression of a swirl shape. Most of them are plain and empty, but a few still have the barcode stickers attached, while a couple others are stamped with handwriting.

“This piece is called ‘Disintegration’ because it is about the erosion of the music industry and the way mp3s are replacing CDs,” Korch said.

“As a DJ, it’s distressing to me to see this because the sound quality of mp3s isn’t very good, and you don’t get the artwork you do with CDs,” he said. “With a lot of the music I like, the artwork is just as important to me as the music. Now, you can’t even buy these jewel cases. They’re going extinct.”

Ian Brill, another Wood Street employee, also has work on display in “Behind Our Scenes.”

“When I got the idea for this piece, I was kind of worn down by the installing process,” said Brill.

“There’s this painting, ‘The Raft of Medusa,’ where everything is just mayhem … that’s the image I get when I think of installing.”

Brill’s contribution to the exhibit is a video installation titled “After Géricault (How Many Preparators Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb).”

The piece consists of a projector casting on a white screen the images of people moving around. It instills an eerie feeling of omnipresence to the onlooker and suggests an overlap of various dimensions as the translucent people flit around, in and through their environment, seemingly independent and unaffected by one another.

“So much of what people do every day in their jobs seems trivial, but it all depends on your interpretation. This was the culmination of a lot of ideas that I had about my experience as an art installer at the time … it is a re-contextualization for other people to interpret as they wish,” said Brill.