The Cracktown Tour Diaries; Week 3 – Part 1 “The Hours Before”

8th February 2009

Things are now gearing up and into shape. A day before the show starts, and almost all i’s are dotted (the t’s crossed yesterday).

All print-outs of project documentation for visitors have been printed/bound, the gallery sandwich board designed and created, the exhibition gift sky-blue usb sticks have arrived, the secret website page created, the main http://www.barringtonarts.com/ site now officially open and updated. Still time for sleep, maybe, but first; the matter of actually hanging the work. Fortunately, my long-time art companion and old friend Jon has much experience in this field – an actual ‘physical’ artist (who makes his own frames and hangs local shows), not a poncey sprightly-stepped conceptualist like me. Together with another old friend, who I will call ‘Shaun’ (for that is his name), we set upon the gallery and hung the work in a matter of hours, together with a last minute sculpture of ‘found items’ (with those thumb-sized cricket corpses barging their way onto the plinth) and the window display completed.

Stuffing dead insects into syringes garnered a few curious looks from passing folk, but the whole setup went swimmingly – even though the whole street right outside the window was overtaken by an Air Cadet marching show for a portion of the show – an over-zealous pc telling us in no uncertain terms that the car carrying my exhibition materials MUST vanish (i.e. “fuck off, the cadets are here”).

The artist who had the gallery space before me kindly left a fairly full box of red wine for us, and that really helped grease my wheels for the rest of the morning/early afternoon.

All setting up now done and dusted, I retire homeward for several hours of heavy slumber before getting up at 3.30am to finish uploading the items to those Cracktown USB sticks.

Its 9.20am, ten minutes before the opening morning of my exhibition, and I’m finding myself racing round town to buy some doughnuts as a well-wishing gift for the nearby legal firm, whose building will sit next to my gimp-adorned Cracktown v1.0 Sandwich Board for the next two weeks.

Its going to be a long day.

I feel it in my water. All good though.

PB.