My gallery, my dream

Tomorrow afternoon in my museum studies class, half of the class will be presenting our virtual gallery projects. I will also be showing my own exhibition to my professor and classmates, and I’m super excited about it.

Virtual gallery is a semester-long project for my museum studies class, which requires me to curate a virtual exhibition on the computer. I had to choose 15 objects that I had access to, and then come up with a theme, or storyline, for the exhibition to connect the objects together. I was also responsible for object documentation, label writing and gallery space designing. If you think it is complicated, then congratulations, technical problems of the software and computer was just a bonus added on to all these!

The objects of my exhibition are 15 pairs of shoes. I bought them in different times and situations, and each of them contains at least one of my personal stories. As a whole, the exhibition almost forms a biography of me, and every time I look at these shoes being displayed in my gallery, I get a reminiscent feeling toward these past moments of my life.

For me, the documentation process was the most complicated and time-consuming part of this project, because I had to deal with Photoshop…well…as an art history student who is always “stuck in the past,” I just can’t master any photo-editing software like this. Ok…so I took an individual photo for each of the 15 objects, opened these photos in Photoshop, and followed the instructions on the Photoshop handout step by step. After hundreds of mistakes, I finally managed to get rid of the backgrounds of my messy desk and keep only the objects themselves. Compared to this, label writing was much easier.

Designing the arrangement of the gallery, I would say, was the most interesting part of the project. I felt like I got full control over everything in the gallery because I could move them wherever I want. I got the freedom to choose the color of the walls, ceiling and floor too, or add some benches, signs, or shelves. It was as if decorating a new apartment, when thinking about how nice the apartment would be after furnishing could easily make me excited.

Viola! So the pictures below show how my final exhibition looks like, and tomorrow will be its formal “opening.” Although it is costly to rent an actual gallery space and to furnish it the way I want, and even harder to gather a large group of visiters who are interested in looking at my old and worn shoes, I could do all this on this virtual site. Reflecting upon the efforts I put on this project, it was like a process of realizing a dream, and I myself was the one who made all the sketches and plans in my mind come true.