Temporary Studio: Monthly Evaluations
solo exhibition by Ioana Nemeș
Orizont Gallery, Bucharest, 8 – 21 February 2006
For contemporary artists, the studio is no longer the only place where to think means to make. Concurrently, nor is the gallery the space of passive consumption, where the public contemplate finished material forms. The new culture of activity blurs the dividing line between practice and reflection, positioning the artist and the work in an infinite chain of contributions, without a fixed identity. What is the current space for art production, when the site-responsive practices and the recycling of ideas or materials produced somewhere else (i.e. post-production and post-studio situation) are rendering the traditional studio redundant? Can the viewers transgress territorial lines and have a complete experience of the complex nature of artistic process and its outcome?
Temporary Studio explored the spaces for art production and display today, both from the perspective of those practices which redefine the understanding of creative processes and from the point of view of the lack of appropriate studio and gallery spaces in Romania. Artists were given temporary space for reflection and action, while the audience was empowered to see how art is made, through a process that aimed at introducing a social dimension into an aesthetic realm.
Ioana Nemeș (1979 – 2011) was the first artist invited to experiment the possibility of ameliorating the function of a space according to the necessities of her creative process. The artist had a strong interest in the British writer Virginia Woolf’s understanding of time and the Swiss psychologist Max Luscher’s ideas about colour. Using these concepts she developed Monthly Evaluations as a nonlinear diary that archived her experiences, assessed through comments/quotations and associated colours, both codified in a personal symbolic system built on five parameters: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial and the chance factor. Since 2005, each day has been evaluated against these parameters, reflecting the distance between the artist’s goals and her achievements; eventually, the process became the project itself, Nemeș’s critical stance on ideas of work, progress and happiness in a bewildering world of change.