SILENT STEPS (and their rather dark and secretive event poster)

Coming next at Cultivate, this Thursday night, SILENT STEPS a group exhibition of photography. That’s right, this week us paintheads at Cultivate have handed over our walls to a group photographers, let’s see what they serve up…. kind of excited to see what they hang and how they hang it, the pieces we saw before we said yes looked interesting,,,

Silent Steps opens at 6pm this coming Thursday 15th November and runs for a week, usual gallery opening times… Goes without saying that everyone is invited to the opening night, 6pm until 9pm, usual corner, middle of the street…

This week is about photographic creativity then, last week was about a question or two. Are you happy to just experience your art on line, photos of opening via Facebook. The gallery up the road has been closed for most of the last month, too busy running their on-line art business/gallery/shop

One of the questions I have is what do you want from an artist-run gallery? When we started all this some fourteen months ago, we kind of thought you artists would embrace it all a lot more than you have.  A little more than just occasionally hanging a piece of work on our walls during one of the group shows and then just checking on Facebook to see how it looks.  Shouldn’t you be flying at us with exciting ideas? Shouldn’t you be wanting to be involved, Art, the experience of experiencing art, the engaging of people, art is only as exciting as you the artists make it…

Fourteen and a half months on from that rushed twenty-two hour opening last September and it is still pretty much just the two of us doing it all, didn’t really expect that to be the case.  Surely East London and places like Vyner Street were originally about artists doing things for themselves, making things exciting, making people want to come out and have a look at what you’re doing.

So what do you actually want from artist-run gallery art space in 2013? If you just want a space where we come up with a title for a group show and you submit a piece of work the new may as well knock it on the head and go open a shop somewhere…. Been fourteen and a half tough time-consuming months. The Art is For Life show/event/whatever it is in December is partly about us fund-raising to keep it all going. Do you want us to though? is it time to say this is done? What do you want from an artist-run art space in East London in 2013? We’d love to know what you think….

(And i guess the cold hard fact of the matter is, if you do want us to be there in 2013 and you do want to get involved then step one is the Art is For Life fund-raising benefit this December, without the funds there is no Cultivate – see previous blog entry)

So 2012, do we go get back to having time to paint, or do we carry on Cultivating?