The St Louis Workshop
My workshop and the image evaluation jury for the St Louis Art Fair was Feb 1st and 2nd. The Friday evening workshop was about how to photograph artwork for jurying. It went four hours because I encouraged questions during the presentation instead of waiting until the end when things might be forgotten.
Saturday was the mock jury image review. It started at 9:00AM and ran until about 7:30PM. The room was set up for a ZAPP projection jury. I was one of three jurors that discussed the sets of projected images. We sat in front of the five screens, though about 15 to 18 feet back. Behind us was a camera was set up to video the entire session.
I tried to not pick on booth pictures aside from pointing out the obvious issues. It seems that last year, the jurors were overly obsessive about the booth, pointing out issues that probably wouldn’t have been noticed within the 20 seconds the images are on screen in a real jury situation.
You could tell when a great cohesive set of images came up, but just as important was the flow and balance of the images as they related to each other. Though I do it all the time when evaluating images on my monitor, seeing the images projected large made it obvious to see relationships between images, and suggest reordering and sometimes flipping images so the presentation appeared more balanced with a more natural flow. By flipping I mean reversing the direction a 3D object faces so it doesn’t draw the juror’s eyes out of the presentation.
It was helpful having knowledgeable jurors. Besides my expertise in photography and being able to explain processes mentioned in the artist statements, there was also a wood worker on the jury who was able to explain techniques that non wood workers wouldn’t have understood. Shows should think more about this when they consider who they choose as jurors. With jewelry being the largest category, there should probably always be a jeweler on juries.
For a detailed overview of my Friday evening workshop and the Saturday image review, Robert Wallis wrote a detailed overview and posted it to Art Fair Insiders.
Videos of the individual medium categories from the image review were posted to Youtube.
