Blink-and-you'll-miss art

by Jay Gabler, TC Daily Planet • July 16, 2008 • My first local art-reviewing assignment sent me to the Art of This gallery on behalf of ARP! I arrived late on a hot afternoon last summer, finding the gallery deserted save for the plastic lions and hairy sock puppets populating the eclectic installation by Caroline Paquita and the Polaroid Kidd. Hearing muffled banging in the basement, I called down and was greeted by a distracted man who told me sure, I could take all the photos I wanted. There wasn't a press kit, but he did offer some stickers and fabric scraps hand-printed with the word CASUALITY.

Arts Orbit is a multisource blog about the local arts scene, featuring both original contributions by Daily Planet writers and entries reprinted from partner blogs and online publications.

My ARP! editors Tiffany Hockin and Ariel Pate have since joined the collective of artists who run Art of This, and this Saturday the gang will be celebrating the gallery's third anniversary in its current space with Its Time, a one-night-only show on the theme of 1968. One-night exhibits—can we call them "flash art"?—may be the wave of the future. Opening an art show for only about the time it would take to see a play or an opera (even if Einstein on the Beach rather than Sound of a Voice) spikes the show with a little conceptual bite, blurring the line between an exhibit and a performance. Maybe this is what the organizers of Its Time were thinking...or maybe they just want to clear the way as quickly as possible for the next shows, which include a series of subsequent "one nighters." Or maybe they just figured that once Scott Seekins has made his appearance, there's no point in carrying on any further.