Abstract

This paper examines the installation of photography exhibitions within the unconventional gallery spaces that have been produced as a part of the relatively recent wave of “iconic” museum architecture. As a medium that has primarily been displayed within the modernist “white cube,” photography presents issues adapting to this new type of gallery interior. This thesis takes, as its case study, the Roloff Beny Gallery, managed by the Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) as located in Daniel Libeskind’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal – a controversial addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Toronto, Ontario. It examines how photographic exhibitions have addressed design and installation issues in this iconic space through three photographic exhibitions

Highlights

  • This paper examines the installation of photography exhibitions within the unconventional gallery spaces that have been produced as a part of the relatively recent wave of “iconic” museum architecture

  • This paper proposes that it can be productive to consider the installation of photography exhibitions as having affinities with the contextualizing practices of artistic installation

  • The persistence of the formalist white cube presentation mode creates challenges for such exhibitions when they move to anti-cube spaces, like Libeskind’s Roloff Beny Gallery

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Summary

Introduction

Matted, framed and hung in linear rows at a standard height. Photography has been primarily exhibited in this manner since Beaumont Newhall–the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) first curator of photography–employed this modernist aesthetic in the 1940s.2 The goal of this approach is to create the impression that the art objects stand alone in the white-walled space, de-contextualized, with no distractions from the gallery architecture. As a result of the artist’s aesthetic, this exhibition attempts to create “invisible” architecture in a space that exerts a powerful architectural presence It will present the translation of the conventional mode of hanging a photography exhibition, in linear rows, in addition to the traditional narrative flow of the white cube, from the “original” exhibition design to the eccentric Roloff Beny Gallery. The exhibitions suggest some assumptions that can be made about the anti-cube gallery–a space where the architecture and object have an weighted relationship with one another and must work together–that contrast with the white cube: a conventional space that foregrounds the art and attempts to neutralize itself This new type of gallery space has been acknowledged, but the discussion has been limited, especially with reference to the exhibitions that take place within iconic cultural institutions. As these spaces raise questions of photographic installation in the gallery interior, this case study will produce a record of photographic exhibitions within the Roloff Beny Gallery, contributing to the relatively meager discourse regarding installation design in the non-white cube space

Literature Survey
Methodology
A GALLERY WITH WALLS
Conclusion
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