Artists spend months, even years, working on a gallery show. What if no one sees it?
Farrah Karapetian's 'The Photograph is Always Now' is included in Leah Ollman's feature, written in the very beginning of the pandemic, about the impact of the shutdown on artists with ongoing exhibitions.
"Numerous shows with start dates just before the shutdown order have been extended in hope that they might still glean some live traffic when public hours can resume. In the meantime, galleries have stepped up their online presence, offering virtual viewing rooms, streaming walk-throughs and digital catalogs. But there’s broad agreement that nothing can substitute for the encounter in real space, or what Farrah Karapetian describes as “the call and response of physical interactivity.” The scale, sound and texture of her photographic and sculptural work, which had to be paused at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, cannot be fully conveyed online.
“It’s an entirely different sensory experience in person,” she said. Almost the entire show derived from iPhone captures, and now “it’s funny, it goes in a loop — from the phone, through this emotional and physical process, and back,” she said.
Dependence on online viewing is necessary now, but this unusual situation merely exaggerates what has become, for many, ordinary behavior.