Case Study - Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Arrival/First Impressions:

1.     As you walk into the Dunedin Public Art Gallery you are greeted by a warm breeze of air on a cold winter’s day.  The art gallery is very open and free, but yet warm and inviting. To your left is the small gift area, which draws me into the lovely artistic postcards. As soon as you walk into the door you are smiled at by a friendly face behind the counter. The super high ceiling which floods the whole entrance makes it feel like summer all year round. Because of this large space, even if the art gallery is really busy you feel like you’re the only person in the building. The only sounds are the sounds of the people chatting around you and the pitter patter of your shoes on the polished wooden floor, which is somehow comforting.

Dunedin Public Art Gallery

2.     Marketing: Walking up George Street and into the Octagon you get a great view of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. The first thing you see are the huge banners in the long windows on the top floor of the gallery. You are able to see the banners clearly and the pictures are bright and interesting. The pictures have to make you want to go inside the gallery and see what’s going on. The Art Galleries signs do a really good job of this.

The Dunedin Public Art Galleries website is also a good way of promoting the exhibitions on at the gallery. The website give a clear and simple overview of the shows currently on at the gallery, they are write just so to leave you wanting more. And the picture makes you want to see more. Also under the exhibition subtitle are past exhibitions and future exhibitions, you are never left with nothing to view.

The other marking tool that works really well is the Dunedin Public Art Gallery leaflet. The leaflet comes out monthly and displays a nice overview (with colour photographs!) of what is happening at the art gallery during that month. (Great handbag size)

The Film Archive

3.      The Film Archive is a small room off to the left hand side, under the staircase. The walls are painted a dark purple colour to make the room feel cosy. Along the wall displays the bookshelf of films/documentaries available to watch. I can’t say I have even taken the time to sit down and watch anything in the room. There is something about watching a film/documentary in public that I don’t like the idea of. It is different to watch a film/ documentary at the movies, you go to the movies with the same idea in mind as everyone else there at the time. Also what puts me off about watching a film/documentary at the DPAG is the fact the one of the walls is made of class. This is the door that you walk into, I think it is needed, or else the room wouldn’t be as inviting to the public. But there is something I don’t like about sitting with my back to the glass wall watching a film/documentary.

Hanging and Framing

4.      The first thing you notice when walking into, Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood exhibition is the size of the photographs, they are huge! The size of the photographs are amazing, the draw you into a whole world, the Nollywood world. All the photographs have simple white frames that make the photographs look amazing. You don’t want the frames to be over powering and stand out to much. The frames do a great job of working with the photographs to make them look as clear as possible. In another exhibition at the DPAG, Beloved, not one of the frames are the same. The exhibition features many different types of paintings and photography. The exhibition is divided into colour coded rooms each with there own theme. Because the artworks were not about to be pulled together through hanging and framing, colour coding was a good way to bring everything together into one overall theme.

Pieter Hugo - Nollywood

Display and Wall Panels/Additional Information

5.      When you walk into any of the exhibitions at the DPAG you are greeted with a write up on the wall about the artist, there live, work etc. It is written into the wall with vinyl lettering and looks really professional. The write ups are often long and many people opt to walk right passed them and look at the works, with sometimes no understanding of the arts practise. I find the write ups very interesting and give me a good base about the arts and his/her works if I don’t already know who the person is. I like the use of the vinyl lettering better than the panel. This is because the vinyl lettering is often displayed in a creative way and makes you want to read the information. Where as the panel textbox looks boring and not very interesting, even if the writing is. I often skim through the textbox, not wanting to spend too much time reading it. However the panel boxes are needed next to the artwork to display to information on artists, year, size etc. There is sometimes quite a lot of writing in these small boxes and the text size is quite small. It is hard to read the boxes if the gallery is busy, you don’t want to get in the way of other people who are viewing the artworks.

Nina Katchadourian - Seat Assignment

Explore

6.      Looking through the DPAG gives you some great ideas on how to display me own work for my exhibition.

As you walk through the gallery you feel like you’re in a different place as you shift through the different exhibitions. This is a really good, because as you move though you forget about the last exhibition as you view the next. When working with a group exhibition it is important to take time to work everything thing out. You have to think about what works can be displayed next to each other and works that will not fight. You will need to be able to be flexible and be open to shifting your work around to see where the best space for everyone will be.   As my work will all be set in the same place (With different scenes in each photograph) it will be easy you group them together. The work will need some white space in-between them so the viewer is able to view them apart and as one work.

As you leave

7.      The things that stick in my mind the most about the DPGA are: how open the gallery feels, as you walk in you feel very free. This feeling helps to clear your mind and lets you like about the artwork you are viewing. You don’t really get this feeling in galleries such as The Blue Oyster. Because the gallery is quite small, compared to Te Papa in Wellington you are able to remember all the exhibitions you viewed that day. This is a good thing being an artist; you want your work to be rememberable when you are first starting off.

Visit at least one other gallery

The Blue Oyster Gallery

8.    The Blue Oyster Arts Trust was founded in Dunedin in 1999 as a governing body of the Blue Oyster Art Project Space. The Space allows a diverse range of artists to work experimentally, free from restraints and irrespective of the stage of their career.

The Blue Oyster Gallery is a very different space compared to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.  The Blue Oyster is just around the corner from the DPAG, but it feels like a mile away. The Blue Oyster is off the street, you walk down a steep graffiti alleyway.  The Blue Oyster door is lit up by a blue neon sign above. The Blue Oyster is very small, not meaning in floor space (Well it is compared to the DPAG) but the ceiling is very low, and you feel very enclosed and trapped. My not saying the Blue Oyster is a bad gallery, because it’s not, it’s just very different. The Blue Oyster is a very artist based gallery and there is something nice about that feeling as you walk in the gallery that you don’t get at the DPAG. The Blue Oyster seems very open to new artists and experimental people who use the gallery as a stepping stone to bigger and brighter thing. The DPAG feels like a gallery of artists who have ‘made it’. You don’t feel as though the artists are connected to their works in the DPAG as they are in the Blue Oyster.

Blue Oyster Art Gallery