Week 4 - Setting up Yuichiro's show

Today we worked on setting up Yuichiro’s future show. We being, me and Micheal Henley a multidisciplinary artist and freelance technician. With regards to technician work, I was already completely comfortable with hanging wall based works, so as soon as I got in I got into the rhythm, getting d links screwed in, cables ran across them, and getting the works up on the wall with the rule of top, drop and bottom. We continued the rest of the day just chatting casually about how to maintain a practice whilst working freelance, how to access the art world, and also how to install more complex works.

 Micheal provided me with a wealth of knowledge about how to “make it” in the art world, the risks of burning out and also the flow of working for money whilst also maintaining a practice. He talked in full about his artistic timeline, up until where he is right now, repeatedly saying, “just keep making”, making me confident about my pre-existing anxieties about lack of time/resources to work. We talked for about 2 hours before Yuichiro arrived, in this time he provided me with vital knowledge on how to stay self driven and sure/confident about my skills in technical work.

Yuichiro was a perplexing character to myself, curating his show based upon the language only expressed from his paintings meant that I had a lot to ask when meeting him. Throughout my experience in art school, we were taught that conceptual works should be vital to our discipline, the key to expressing a synesthetic story. Though, Yuichiro made because of aesthetic, exploring how different elements effected the final visual outcome. This motive perplexed me, and after another two hours of mining him for reasons and motives, I’m still left perplexed. Though, Yuichiro is food for thought going forward as his practice and philosophy acts as an alley that I previously disregarded.