Colin Fraser Gray

MUSEUM FOR ONE

Museum for One

There is a wonderful documentary called ‘Twenty Feet from Stardom’ that came out a year or so ago that caught both my ear and my eye. It is all about the backup singers to the rock stars over the last 30 or 40 years. We have known these people inti- mately through their voices for a long time, but for the most part have never known their names, or for that matter, cared. The attention is never on them, but on the lead singer prancing around in the spotlight out front. The documentary forever changed that for me, and now, through some internal rewiring, I have more ears, more receptors for these folk, who enhance and frame the main singer, and who, at best, make the music transcendent.

There is a parallel universe of exhibition designers in the visual art world, and they inhabit that same realm of invisibility back- stage, but they can make even marginal artwork feel good for the duration of ones tour around a room. I have seen it done.

This new work at FOCA was preceded by installations of drawings, that were mounted on painted walls, like a mashup of color field painting with framed pen and ink drawings mounted on top. I was making a single entity out of a kind of miniature exhibition design, and the artwork itself.

I was looking at Christian Boltanski, as well as the photographs of Berndt and Hilla Becher when I wondered if it were possible to do a Becher type piece but with a series of black and white drawings, instead of photographs. I wanted the eye to jump around, and see all the differing permutations, making the relationship between the drawings and the sense of infinite possibility the content of the work. I have always been interested in creative possibilities, trying it one way and then another, and then another...There is something inherently positive and life affirming about our ability to think of new things out of seemingly nowhere.

Now one would have thought that I had enough on my plate just working in this way, but I started to miss a sense of the absurd. Not just any absurd, but the absurd that is actually sensible, in the light of the fact that we have no idea why we are here on the planet, yet we behave as if we do. This is the absurd, that shows we have things in perspective, like the absurd that shows up in the existentialism of Camus.

Hence I added shelves, with a built in wine glass holder, and a half bottle of wine. This, in the realm of the Museum for One, is for the opening. Yes...true, its slightly melancholy with but one glass and all, but MOCA has not called recently.

Anyhow, going back to exhibition design, and by extension exhibition space, and in particular the architecture of Frank Gehry. I have noted over the years that his work is art, and ‘regular’ art looks vaguely daft next to it, or even in it. I was perusing his amazing Brain Center in Las Vegas a year or so ago, and inside the majestic central room was a giant rectangular painting. It looked IMHO, a little odd, like something from another era.

Now I have to be Frank with you Frank, I thought, - you have set visual artists up with a huge challenge; everything was going along swimmingly, and now you come along, and build windows all over the place even on the ceilings. WTF? So the challenge we are faced with, is how can you make art that is as good as the museum that houses it when the museum happens to be the Bilbao? Can we? Is it possible? Or perhaps the art is a vehicle for us to experience the architecture? A good reason to gather at a particular place. ‘Museum for One’ (Red) and ‘Museum for One’ (Blue) are my first forays into exploring the idea of a miniature personal museum, and different ways of exhibiting artwork in non regular buildings and circumstances. If Bilbao ever call me, I am damn well going to be ready.

Colin F. Gray May 2016

Limited addition signed archival prints available. email for more info colingray1@mac.com