Client: The Ukrainian Museum

Overview

An interactive project exploring creativity designed to engage museum visitors A dozen large panels and numerous puzzle-like companion pieces were designed to fill the space and invited visitors to select and arrange the individual pieces on the surfaces of the panels, altering them to their liking. Pieces were of varied sizes some figurative some not using the artists signature style. They could be attached and reattached to the panels in an endless number of combinations allowing for a continually changing exhibition that developed a life of it’s own.

Goals

This installation focuses on the the physical experience of building a painting. In the age of interactive everything – I decided to engage in “co-creation” in a real and practical way – giving visitors a hands on opportunity to touch, feel, and think about a painting in ways that they aren’t generally allowed to, especially in a museum setting. These paintings and their pieces (each hand painted) are actual works of art which have been dissected in order to let them be rearranged. The goal is to see how meaning and emphasis can be distorted and interpreted to develop something new. Everything in the world today is about reinvention and change. Each panel consisted of a painted framework which was just a starting point. Visitors were asked to create their own compositions. The work in the gallery developed a life of it's own, always evolving. Every day brought surprises and insights on process, meaning and possibility. This has changed my perspective on the end result in such projects. It is a conversation not merely a creation designed and built by the artist.

Process

The museum invited the creation of new works designed for the interactive installation. The pieces were developed with a space an the dialogue in mind. The pieces came out of traditional painting methods employing a wide array of surfaces attached to steel panels. The team additionally worked on a series of events that related to the works inventive approach. Pieces were built to be flexible but site specific with the ongoing "conversation" with the viewers/collaborators in mind. Social media was encouraged and illustrated the results of the ongoing collaboration. A collection of these can be seen at http://recreateart.org/recreations/

Additional Information

Documentation on the project can be found at http://recreateart.org/.