"Side Project"
SIDE PROJECT
July 18, 2011
PØST
1904 7th Place, Los Angeles, 90021
Erich Bollmann
Alice Clements
Erik Frydenborg
Amy Green
Marc Horowitz
Alice Konitz
Curt LeMieux
Kristi Lippire
Matt Wardell
A side project in art can be interpreted in various ways. It could be a project that runs parallel to an artist's main medium/technique/body of work that has developed over time. It could be a new direction that doesn't quite seem to fit in but might herald bigger and more involved things to come. It could be a group of works that have never been shown due to the commercial pressure for continuity, or due to the artist's unsure feeling about them.
This show is an opportunity for artists to stretch outside of their normal arena, or to air out something that's been lurking in the wings.
Questions implicit in the side project are : how much of an artist's continuity arrives out of market pressure or some idea that we "should" be consistent and develop in a linear manner? Does talent lie mainly in one medium or direction for most artists or are we more multivalent than we think we are? Does an artist's work simply go through phases over time that appear different from each other or can there be truly different work that comes out of a single time?
Does work get better or worse when it is developed? Have we been trained to focus, or is it our natural inclination? Can we untrain ourselves? Is there value in taking multiple directions at once or is it just jumpy? How many different directions could one take without all or part the work suffering? Two? More than two?
Side projects are common in music, why is this term less familiar in the context of art?