The exciting new "telephone" art show opening in a few weeks received an advance story in today's Grand Rapids Press.
Artists play visual 'telephone' game
Sunday, May 14, 2006
By Gail Philbin
The Grand Rapids Press
GRAND RAPIDS -- Area artists may feel like kicking themselves after they visit "The Telephone Show," an unusual exhibit opening June 2 at the ByrneBoehm Gallery.
The show is a visual arts version of the old children's game of passing a whispered message from person to person to see how it changes, only the "message" that mutates in this case is a piece of art.
Now that the idea for this show has come from 26-year-old artist Kelly Allen, it seems like such an obviously novel and effective way to create a chain of artistic inspiration, some artists may wonder why they didn't think of it themselves.
The initial "message" in "The Telephone Show" is a mixed-media work titled "Tummy Ache" created by Allen that has been re-imagined in succession by seven other artists, each one working only from the previous artist's piece. The exhibit is comprised of Allen's painting and its seven subsequent versions.
Each artist had up to one month to finish his or her piece and toiled in the dark in terms of the series as a whole -- each person was allowed to see only the work of the artist before him or her, and Allen didn't see any piece except her own.
As they completed their works, the artists gave the one that served as their inspiration to the gallery for safekeeping and passed their own on to the next artist.
"I wanted it to be as big a surprise for the artists as possible," said Allen, explaining the secrecy.
The artists didn't set out to copy the "message" they received but instead had free rein to "pick up on a color scheme or ... whatever they wanted to pull," Allen said.
How the resulting show will look is anyone's guess, given the diverse media the artists bring to the table and the unpredictable ways they may have interacted with each other's works. To determine where they fell in the chain of art creation, they picked numbers from a hat.
In order of participation, the artists are: Kelly Allen, mixed-media and painting; Alison Jones, mixed-media and digital photography; Andrea Lutz, photography; John Mosher, abstract oil painting; Tommy Allen, photography; Jenn Schaub, printmaking and painting; Shelly Klein, sewing; and Dan Ward, realist painting.
Kelly Allen created a "tongue-in-cheek" piece to kick off the experiment -- a confection of such images as candy, hearts and hamsters that recall the sweetness of childhood. If "Tummy Ache" were a telephone message, it would be saying something about Allen's memories as a little girl, she said.
"It's something I would have loved back then," she said of the sugary, surreal world of the painting.
It remains to be seen whether or not Allen's light-hearted message stayed intact during what turned out to be a nine-month game of Telephone beginning in September 2005 when Allen started her piece.
Whatever "The Telephone Show" ends up looking like, Allen believes it will offer a unique way of exploring interpersonal communication and interpretations of meaning in social interactions.
"The transition from one artwork to the next acts as a visual metaphor for the ways in which humans communicate their intentions, how they might be understood or misunderstand, and finally interpreted or misinterpreted as the message is passed along through time," she said.
"The Telephone Show" has proven challenging for some of the artists, because it has taken them out of their "groove" and required them to draw inspiration from something other than what they're used to, Allen said Despite that, she hopes to do the experiment again.
"Every single time, it will be a completely different show," she said. "It will never get old."
Gallery: ByrneBoehm Gallery
959 Lake Drive, SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49506
Phone: (616)336-0209
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