WHAT IS AN EXHIBITION? Artwork By Gabriel Martinez and Jeanine Oleson, Written by: Theodore Kerr

I don’t know what an exhibition is. When I say the word - exhibition - I don’t have a strong sense that people know what I am talking about as is the case when I say book, movie, or album. It is not that those words are not without a variation in meaning. It is that exhibition is a word whose possible meanings could and should be explored for the greater good of people who care about art.

As a writer and organizer who programs, edits and curates, I have experience with exhibition, and that in fact my experience has led me to be less sure about what the word - or more importantly, the concept - means. To work through the meaning, below is an interview I did with artists Gabriel Martinez and Jeanine Oleson.

Recently Martinez and Oleson showed work in their two-person exhibition Memory of the Future at Grizzly Grizzly, which the gallery describes as bringing together “Oleson’s whimsical sculptures and Martinez’ experimental photographic works,” to “confront seismic global and cultural challenges through a lens that both celebrates and explores emotional connections to place, loss, and the complexities of representing inner experiences.”

For the two artists, the exhibition was an opportunity to meet and get to see their seemingly disparate - yet related - works together. While both are deep into research, each artist has a unique way to represent their process. Martinez is primarily photo-based. He experiments with surface and presentation with content focused on history, archives, community sexuality, physical space and LGBTQ life. Oleson makes 3D objects (often moving, interactive and mechanical), along with performances, and occasionally posters. Recently her work has centered around an exploration of how we experience the world - including culture - through our senses.

My exhibition-related angst is due to Oleson and Martinez. A few months ago curator Diedra Krieger, a member of the Grizzly Grizzly artist collective, contacted me to write about Memory of the Future.Once I told her I would not be able to see the exhibition while it was up I thought the offer would disappear. But it remained. This confused me. Why would I write about an exhibition that passed? How could I write about an exhibition without seeing it while it was up?

Krieger provided me with a folder of images from the exhibition and a video tour hosted by the artists. Looking first at the photo documentation, there was an exhilarating disparateness to the collected works. It was clear which pieces were by which artists. Elusive though was an immediate understanding of the works’ relationship with each other. For that, the video tour was useful.

Besides a generous rigor the two artists bring to their work, Oleson and Martinez have in common a sense of play and a musicality. A highlight of the video tour (and the exhibition, I am sure) was the interaction between Oleson’s “Can You Feel It”, a 2017 pink and beige shell wired as a speaker, mounted on the wall, looping the mid 1980s dance classic by Mr. Fingers from which the sculpture gets its name; and Martinez’s, “Stonewall (Axis),” a 2022 silver gel print assemblage showcasing a larger than life black, white and grayscale vision of a man from behind, illuminated yet obscured by light, from a 1981 archival source. Together, the photowork and the sculpture conjure a sensual counter-archive in the present, a dragging forward and inter-mingling of information through sight and sound, of the 1980s into the present, a collision of anxiety, rooted in infection, proximity, frivolity, and premature death. Memory of the Future is the exhibition title, a Pet Shop Boys song, and a way of naming an encounter with time.

As I experienced it, Oleson and Martinez’ exhibition was intimate and engaging, which brings me back to confusion. The slipperiness of what we mean when we say exhibition was intensified for me by my experience of Memory of the Future, specifically, Krieger’s kind gesture of providing me with the photo and video documentation. Did I see the exhibition? Or is documentation primarily a form of exhibition artifact? Is artifact separate from exhibition? Do these distinctions matter?

Krieger’s gesture also illuminated for me biases I have around exhibition, specifically that the main value of an exhibition is exposure of the work and artists while the exhibition is up; and that as a concept, exhibitions are primarily in a set space and time. While I might actually agree with both of these statements, having to name them reminds me that other people may feel differently, may in fact feel that there is no one main value of an exhibition, nor a fixed idea of what an exhibition is or isn’t. This opportunity for difference and conversation excites me.

And I hope it excites you too. I think the interview below makes clear that opening up conversation around exhibition is a good use of time. People come to the word - and the concept - of exhibition with different expectations and possibilities. At the end of the conversation Oleson provides an additional way to think about exhibition, one that I anticipate further conversation about what we mean when we talk about exhibition.

Theodore (ted) Kerr:

What role does exhibition play in your artistic practice? I'm asking this because I don't want to take exhibition for granted, either as a given, or as a necessity.

Gabriel Martinez:

For me, an exhibition is the closing of a chapter, it's the creation of a book, it's about decisions. And it's about editing. And editing is very difficult. It is about knowing which works create a particular context that elevates, or provides a particular discussion.

Not everything and anything makes sense, but as artists, we are not necessarily the best curators of our own work.

So, for our show, Jeanine and I came upon a number each of us would present and that was actually the way that I think that we decided how this exhibition was going to start to take form.

And we thought since Grizzly Grizzly is a tiny intimate situation, maybe two or three pieces per artist would make sense. Reaching that idea came through conversation that flowed. We met via Zoom, and talked with Diedra, and started to narrow down the works that we were thinking about for the exhibition. I was curating my own work, thinking about Jeanine's work, and thinking about a particular context that I wanted to respond to right now.

Jeanine Oleson:

For me, it's like how to make a place-based composition of things I've been working on. Sometimes it's to finalize things, and sometimes I alter them to fit the needs of place, but I always think about it as a final composition in a way. It's like the work is its own form, and then how, if it has unexpected inner relations with each other, once it's in space together.

I also really love audiences, and I love trying to figure out how to interact with audiences in different ways, in really different contexts. But it also forces me into one version of a final.

Kerr:

I'm surprised by both of your answers. Gabe, you talked about the end of a book, and Jeanine, you used the word final, and that's interesting to me. It's like a shutting down or a closing, is that of the artwork? Is that the idea?

Oleson:

It's one held moment, is what I think. It's like a freeze frame. Once it's up, unless you have a mechanism in place to change something, you are left with the decisions that you've made. And it's public. So, that's in a way a finality. I think about it almost compositionally, like pulling elements together for one form of composition in space and time.

Martinez:

Yeah, I feel strongly that the individual works have a future life. But for this moment, once everything's said and done, things are in place, it's locked in history in a sense. And it's set, and there are various interpretations to the flow between our works, but for that moment in time it is finalized.

Oleson:

And you learn a lot from those decisions. You learn a lot from seeing what it is that you've decided is right at that time. And then looking back sometimes it's like, oh, I did that that way, interesting. It's a pressure to get things done, and to make final decisions, because you can make a work and then until you actually have it live how it's supposed to, it has a really different life. Exhibition is a way to pull something out of the head, or out of the body, out of the studio, and be like, oh, okay, this is what that is in the world…it’s an amazing opportunity to have shows.

Kerr:

What role does exhibition have on you, the artist, and what role does exhibition have on the artworks?

Oleson:

It forces me into decisions, or it helps me make decisions. It's an opportunity. You can think about that in terms of a generosity of time and space to actually be able to put the work up and consider it. So, that is often the end goal for some pieces. The goal is for it to live in a space in that way. And that's the thing, it's one standard. It's not the only standard for how an artwork lives, but it's one. And for the work, it provides that moment, and sometimes the moment changes. I've had shows where I'm like, okay, everything comes out and it goes into a performance, or this is a show and everyone's supposed to participate in it. Or this is supposed to change public opinion, or interfere in people's ideas of what they think an artwork is.

But in the case of our show, it was a traditional exhibition, so that's how the work functioned in the space. There wasn't much of a challenge, it's like they're objects for an engagement and understanding from whoever came there to see them. You never know who those people are. It's like having this relationship and conversation (hopefully) with people.

Martinez:

At times, the exhibition sets up the goal, the moment. Sometimes we're working on various works simultaneously, and that exhibition is a moment that provides a certain sense of urgency toward the completion of a work.

Oleson:

Gabe, I am not sure if it is the same for you, but I'm always so surprised that I'm excited to talk to people once the work is public, in a way that I am not always thinking about as the work is being made. During the exhibition, I'm like, If anyone wants to talk to me… hello! I'm just so thrilled, and I learn a lot from the conversations. It feels like, I don't know, being a kid at a slumber party. You can't go to sleep because you had too much sugar and exposure!

Martinez:

Yes. But I also get wonderfully frustrated when I see people looking at my work, and I'm like, oh, did they understand this specific thing, or that particular layer? I get excited about the process, the methods and materials employed in making the work, along with the context and metaphors. I love metaphors, and symbols within the work. So, yes, I can get very excited to talk to people and maybe about disclosing, maybe too much about the work or myself, but I love that too. For us, as the artist, it's right there. But I think a lot of viewers are not going to spend that much time trying to really fully understand the various layers.

Oleson:

Yeah. Even when they say things that, wow, never occurred to me, it opens up stories too. For me, when it comes to exhibition, I think about objects being a device to pull different things out of different people. I have this whole idea about connoisseurship, which is coming from love and enthusiasm, and for things that have nothing to do with you, the artist. Which is so weird in the world, where everything has to be attached or owned, but connoisseurship is different. And especially in culture, it's just, where people are willing to have a relationship to something else that they're not gaining from exactly, other than that enthusiasm. That's a whole other conversation.

Currently on view at the Leather Archives & Museum Chicago until July 2024, is Sparks in a Dark Room: Exchange, Pleasure and Play, Reimaginings by Gabriel Martinez.

In the spring Jeanine Oleson will be heading to the American Academy in Rome as a winner of the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize.

Pick up Theodore (ted) Kerr’s book We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022) which he co-wrote with Alexandra Juhasz

Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer and organizer. He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?. He was a co-organizer of Wish You Were Here, Wish Here Was Better (Blackwood Gallery, UTM) with Zoe Dodd, Ellyn Walker and Les Harper. The exhibition won the 2023 Galeries Ontario Award for Best Public Program. Kerr is co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press), with Alexandra Juhasz. He teaches at The New School and Manhattan College.

Gabriel Martinez is a Philly-based multidisciplinary artist with a focus on LGBTQ+ culture and history. His work explores themes of loss, celebration, memorial, sexuality, and cultural identity. He researches the late 70s and early 80s milieu, drawing inspiration from Queer archives, the AIDS pandemic, disco aesthetics, and more. Born in Miami, Florida, Martinez received his MFA from Tyler and BFA from the University of Florida, both in photography. He is the recipient of prestigious awards, including the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation grant. Martinez has showcased his work nationally and participated in various artist residencies, including at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Yaddo, and MASS MoCA.

Jeanine Oleson is an interdisciplinary artist known for her complex and humorous creations in images, materiality, and language. Her work examines material effects of power through a queer and feminist lens. Oleson holds degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rutgers University. She has exhibited and performed globally, with appearances at The Kitchen, Cubitt Gallery, Hammer Museum, SculptureCenter, and more. Oleson has received recognition through grants such as the Rome Prize, Creative Capital Artist Grant and the Franklin Furnace Fellowship. She is also a lead collaborator on Photo Requests from Solitary, a project supporting individuals in solitary confinement through images and advocacy in US prisons including a long-term installation at Eastern State Penitentiary.