Photo of the Usher house from http://www.thecollectionmuseum.com/?/hire-us
Our initial idea started from the fact that the Gallery used to be a home. We took the idea of using the house as a house for the homeless instead of a place of art to be displayed. We planned to see how much money the Gallery got from donations, compared to the amount the Homeless would get. However, after a feedback session with our lecturers we realised how this method of performance was just not possible within the time we had, and with the personal experience we have.
So, we decided to look for new inspiration. We looked instead at the gallery instead of the house itself. We thought of the idea behind galleries, and the rules and regulations you had to keep to within a gallery. We decided to create an ‘anti-gallery’. We used the famous quote of ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ and decided to use lost and abandoned objects from the streets of Lincoln and present them in a gallery like setting. We want to take all these objects and make them look beautiful and extravagant. We want to add audio to our piece and integrate text into our performance, we found a book called ‘The New York Trilogy’ By Paul Auster and we’ve started to collect quotes we thought were relevant to our project.
Also, after this feedback session we decided to use the gardens of the gallery instead of the education sweet or the museum itself; we would have a lot of damaged objects and we were worried about how much of a mess it could possibly leave the usher in.
Within our piece we hope to create an ‘anti-gallery’. By having curators and performers out on ‘display’ and by having the objects laced around instead of on plinths and behind glass. We want people to be able to touch, hold and play with these items (which you can’t usually do in a gallery). At this point, we have just decided to do an exchange with the objects. So, hopefully throughout the day, if people want to exchange an object in our gallery for something they have that belongs to them, they will be more than welcome to.
When we started the idea, and started to decide exactly what it is we would be doing, I did think it would be a lot easier with five of us collecting items from the city of Lincoln. We started off in places close by to us all, finding a lot around the University and down the high street, towards Portland Street, however, once we started collecting, it did seem a lot more challenging than we all first anticipated. There wasn’t anything really up towards to cathedral, and with only one car between all five of us it was a challenge to collect bigger items. Once we had collected everything we needed from one part of town, we started to struggle to find stuff close by. We did still manage to find a lot of bulk items which, luckily, some of them were impressive enough on there own so, didn’t really need a lot more added but, some items were so small we were worried about where we would present them. So, we decided to try and collect as many of these smaller items as possible. We found as many shoes and umbrellas as we could get our hands on! One of these on there own wasn’t very impressive, but the amount we ended up being able to get our hands on was amazing!