Shadows in a Theatre Box
Solo Exhibition, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 2024
An exhibition of work presenting Rachael Ryder’s ongoing research into community spaces as cultural spaces.
Presenting collaborative moving image work and paintings by artist and researcher Rachael Ryder made with members of Central and West Integration Network, the Wing Hong Chinese Elderly Centre, Age Scotland, and Mika Hairdressers, each conversation and each work, challenges the notion of cultural space. The show reimagines what cultural art spaces can be by platforming the voices we hear less often in the arts and sharing these ideas, words, art and experiments. What becomes clear in the work is the distinction between community space and cultural space and the need for cultural space transformed to serve communities.
Most commonly, a traditional gallery space’s physical form is a sharp box with white walls: it denotes restriction and limitation. Visitors often adopt a performative behaviour in the space, it can feel like being shadows in a theatre box. For many, this is a barrier to entry and enjoyment of these spaces. For Ryder, these essential elements of cultural space can be used as tools for its complete transformation. With an awareness of the nature of art spaces, Shadows in a Theatre Box allows for a freer performance to take place, one that is fluid, reactive to its audience and rooted in co-production. This show readdresses the idea of cultural space, informed by conversations between community members and the artist.
Born in 1983, Transmission is artist-led, committed to providing accessible and equal opportunities for all artists and public members through their outreach, communication, and programming, with all committee members devoting voluntary labour and care to proactively engage harder-to-reach and diverse communities. This approach resonates with the research by offering a comfortable art space through moving image programming. The space not only exhibits the work to a public audience but gives life to notions that the gallery can be whatever people need it to be.
Existing collaborations between CWIN and Transmission, provide relatively limitless resources and access to facilities that further harmonise the connection between this research and the space on King St.
The work of this exhibition is the culmination of creative collaborations and conversations with community groups, workers and everyday people who seek support in a space or network. The work is not finished nor perfect but impressionistic in what ideas and desires certain groups have about art spaces; to be an experience, a tropical holiday to escape, with life alive inside it. Sharing ideas over several months has allowed a liberation and fantastical process for a grounding in the research. There is a space in between what is a space of care and a cultural space and it may be in the imaginations of the harder-to-reach groups - perhaps a landscape moving image and painted cloth offers up a new location to think otherwise towards cultural spaces that welcome not exclude. The soft and simple approach to social practice is not complex, but often, the justification is. For this exhibition, peeling back what we know to be true about what traditional cultural spaces need to be was a process of shedding, flowing and growing.
