apexart is Franchising in 2009! On December 1, our open call ended during which we accepted 250-word proposals from individuals and groups around the world, asking submitters to pitch why apexart should come to their hometown providing all of the support necessary, plus $10,000 in budget, to produce a one-month exhibition in May/June of 2009. The Franchise was conceived to explore a relationship between art and commerce and to enable an exhibition based on meritocratic consensus.
To further extend the public interactive nature of this idea, we asked a large number of individuals (over 200 people) to take part on a jury to score proposals. The proposals are from every country and every size city, town and village around the world. Reading them provides an interesting view of what people are thinking and what they feel needs attention in their respective art communities.
We invited 295 jurors to participate in the evaluation, who cast 6,942 votes (scoring them 1-5) with each proposal receiving approximately 26 votes. There were 456 proposals from 65 countries, with the greatest concentration from the U.S. (38 states), and the winning entry receiving an averaged score of 3.34. Interestingly, the top proposals were identified early and remained on top throughout the process. You can view the proposal ranking at http://apex-art.org/franchise/results.php as well as read submissions by clicking on the ID number. Names have been removed from the proposals.
The winning proposal comes from Los Angeles, CA:
The League of Imaginary Scientists is a group of interdisciplinary thinkers and tinkerers who present ambitious participatory art events with repurposed mechanics and scientific assertions. The League concocts micro-festivals for microorganisms, invites scientific luminaries onto local stages, and pours limited paper money into our bottomless pit of ideas. The resulting diversions from the everyday celebrate the everyday: past exhibitions showcased a communication device for talking to bacteria and a machine for reversing progress and returning viewers to childhood. League exhibitions simultaneously subvert and revamp the story of science. More than anything, the League of Imaginary Scientists is a consortium for ideas – a mental exhibition space where conversations and collaborations are hatched. We seek affiliation and guidance by Apexart because A) we do not have the know-how or funds to leap from independent art collective to independent art space, and B) the League was formed on a street called Apex Avenue in Silverlake in 2006. For our dream exhibition in our city of Los Angeles, the League proposes an exhibition of artworks that function as scientific research for studies without intentionality – purely for experimentation.
Examples of the types of projects we would like to exhibit include art and science in the vein of research practiced by artists such as Andrea Polli, whose work includes a study on locust eyes, and Kelly Andres, whose mobile laboratory allows city-goers to listen to ecology, as well as groups like Harvard's neuroscience laboratory, currently creating the first molecular film of an unraveled mouse brain.
Aspirations for an evocative idea-oriented exhibition aside, the League gives great weight to the word, Apex. Our own origins anticipated an eventual peak. Perhaps this is it. |
