Open Call: An Art Game Show, 2015
A project by Amanda Leigh Evans.
This art reality game show was curated as part of Over and Back at Surplus Space in Portland, OR (co-curated with Ryan Woodring).
Over and Back refers to a rule in basketball in which a team who has taken the ball beyond the half-court line into the opponent’s territory can not voluntarily retreat past that line without penalty. Since sports journalists are particularly prone to wordplay, I am borrowing this phrase to describe a unique binary in professional sports culture relating to the act of remembering. On one hand, sports are characterized by an ephemerality in which players are cycled through their youth and each year, regardless of the previous season’s successes or failures, the standings reset. While players are encouraged to forget, those who watch sports engage in a growing economy based in remembering. Fans, and the market surrounding them, capture and monumentalize fleeting moments of muscular serendipity with an expansive set of recording devices. The artists in this exhibition use the material of spectatorship, from televisions to t-shirts, to form nuanced personal and communal takeaways from fandom culture. With arrow-sized sewing needles, motorized tracks, silkscreened memorials, and karaoke pep-talks, each artist effectively plays on both ends of the court.
Open Call is a competition for visual artists that parodies the form of a sports tryout, a juried application process, and a reality game show. For this iteration, five artists were selected from a pool of applicants to compete in a series of challenges that tested their intellect, creativity, and professional "skill" in front of a live studio audience. At the end of four rounds of challenges Megan Harned, visual art critic at Willamette Week, chose Sarah Wolf Newlands as the winner. She was awarded a solo show at composition which occurred in September 2016.
Four rounds of challenges: Create 3 works of art (15 min), Write an 100 word artist statement (5 min), Document the work and post it online (5 min), and Give an artist talk using the images posted online (3 min each).
Competitors: Nina Berry, Spencer Byrne-Seres, JAH Justice, Eric John Olson and Sam Wildman, and Sarah Wolf Newlands.
Featuring Beatrice Redstar Fletcher as round transition sign holder.
Photos by Tim Roth.
