Previous Exhibition

Side Gallery Participating artists

Jun 7 – Jul 17, 2020

What has lead us to this point?

During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world began to cease normal functions and practices of capitalism and daily life. Art galleries closed to adhere to regulations. We, as a small independent gallery in an inner-city suburb, were left with an art exhibition (43 Minutes by The KACA Projects) strung in a kind of limbo, unable to be viewed and promoted, nor able to be dismantled and bumped out. We suggested to the artists of The KACA Projects that there may be a way to evolve the concept of the fifth wall and what the KACA Projects had intended to explore. Through online discussions, The KACA Projects, together with Side Gallery, put together a COVID-19 version of an artist residency and invited the members from the original wall-painting experiment to become the new caretakers of the fifth wall — Sideways (After 43 Minutes). The KACA Projects relinquished power and control of the project in a ceremonial handover statement (below), and each caretaker was given a week to use the space; however they saw fit. As the gallery owner and curator, we also relinquished some control: Leesa put the entire program for the year on hold to adhere to regulations and allowed this development to occur without concern for the outcome. Laura relinquished curatorial control of the caretaker residencies. Both of these responses were attempts to consider this “new normal” — reject the very obvious “white wall gallery business model”— and disregard the desire for a commercial (capitalist) outcome. The KACA Projects reflected, “The KACA Projects are interested in the way ‘the wall’ and its ‘objects’ have become signifiers for a new space that has opened up. A space we are thinking of like a ‘wedge’ or a ‘chasm’. A space that could conceive a social and political order where profits are not above people—one that generates a ‘new kind of intention to the world’.”

Our view into the void, wedge or chasm was reflective. We questioned how this model works, and whether we sit within that framework.

We have invited expressions of interest from new participants to take part in an exhibition. Both physical and digital iterations of the exhibition occur during a free week in the residency program.

Both physical and digital components embody the shapes that were left by The KACA Projects in the fifth wall (see 43 Minutes by The KACA Projects).

Five particle board materials, with the shapes from the fifth wall recessed into the board, and digital vector files were available to the new group of artist experience participants.

We invited each artist as maker/doer to actively affect/impress upon/manipulate/evolve or devolve/make/create from the impression to suit their experience, and return the work to us as caretakers for exhibiting.

The exhibition at Side Gallery will be curated both online and in the space. A physical and digital exhibition created by open-source collaborative experiences, the creative outcomes of which are not predetermined or guided by the director-curator caretakers.

Artists
Olivia Adlard, Paula Austin, Jordan Azcune, Kate Barry, Jarrad Eve, Tallara Gray, Louise Isackson, Alia Josephine, Kagede, Carissa Karamarko, Sam Kariotis, Pia Larsen, Julie Paterson, Rossanne Pellegrino, Aaron Perkins, Carolina Navarrete, Jack Randell, Kirralee Robinson, Tamara Scheiwe, Xinxin Wen, Adrienne Williams