Northern Spark will serve as the venue for the inauguration of PERIPATETIC, a mobile gallery designed to house small curated exhibits of every ilk.
Though miniature in scale, at roughly 3’ x 5’ x 2’, and situated atop a custom-built cart for easy transport, the gallery is not technically a maquette of a larger structure. It functions as a fully operational non-commercial art space that will eventually host a semi-regular schedule of exhibits and related programming. Admittedly, the size of the facility limits the range of work that can be displayed, but the mobile nature of the gallery will potentially provide access to art to a much wider audience than a typical art gallery might attract.
I am interested in exploring how the character of the interaction between art and a public is contingent on the particular locations the gallery will travel to and temporarily occupy. The frame of the Northern Spark festival provides an ideal, if perhaps overly comfortable initial staging of the gallery as it is clearly situated as a work of art, a project among projects.
It bears emphasizing Peripatetic’s central premise. It is at once a model – a representation of a gallery – a scaled down facsimile that can’t be entered physically, and, by dint of a brazen assertion of its singularity an actual cultural institution.
Peripatetic occupies a liminal zone between fact and fiction, the real and the virtual- it’s a space I’d argue we already live in all the time. This project just draws attention to this basic phenomenon of human existence in a novel way.