It's the 50th anniversary of the National Gallery of Modern Art, so in celebration the galleries' entire collection is currently on display. Being that I've been considering ways of visually referencing collections in a manner that audiences can engage with that are non-ocular, viewing this exhibition kind of gave me an insight into how a collection works thats primary purpose is to be engaged with by an audience. The curation of such a wide collection of work, even in something as ambiguous as modern art spanning over a 50 year period, was undertaken logically and categorically. Works were divided into groups, some as simple as 'Heads' or 'Things', others included 'Still Life' or 'The Artist as a Subject'. This kind of provided a loose narrative to the exhibition, if it were somewhat chronological, in terms of when the objects were either made or acquired by the gallery, I feel it would have felt a lot more broken in this sense. Some of the groupings seemed to clash a little, particularly the more simply named, I felt like they were kind of placed together with such a vague connection, the content of the works so wide it felt like the shouldn't be in a room together.
A trend I noticed, which has encouraged my choice of media for the exhibition, was that pieces utilizing light were given there own space, if not it was much easier to be drawn towards those particular pieces.
Light seemed in general to have a great deal of influence in the curatorship of this exhibit, some rooms allowed natural light in, particularly the monotone and more greyscale works. Other rooms were in complete darkness apart from the works' themselves, the centre piece - commissioned for this exhibition - was made up almost entirely of abstracted lamposts. What's bad about this is if I want to use light as part of my piece in the exhibition, I have to figure out what light I don't want as part of piece, I don't know if this will require building some sort of booth or just choosing a space - if there are any available - where the use of light can be used to a worthwhile extent.
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