Curatorial Practice: Curator and Producer
Cause Way: Paul Donald
Solo Exhibition
Miami Beach Urban Studios
September - October 2013
Installation View (2013)
Canada-based and New Zealand-born artist Paul Donald has built a raised wooden walkway—like perhaps something one might see traversing a swamp in south Florida—from one side of the gallery to the other. However, plinths positioned near the front of the gallery not only obscure a full view, but also block physical entry. Sheets of plywood also cover the glass doors in the hallway. A few jaggedly cut holes in the plywood allow for a view of what is in inside the gallery—but again, only a frustratingly partial one.
On top of the plinths are monitors on which video of the artist building the walkway in real time is looped; each monitor reflects roughly an hour of the artist’s work. In a dramatic manner, Donald re-directs our attention away from an artwork as a disembodied pure form or object to one as a product of the labor of the artist and a viewer’s always already mediated experience. That is, even the direct, live experience we expect to have in galleries as viewers is an implicitly constructed one.
–Alpesh Kantilal Patel
