Dennis Hollingsworth

AIRCAT 2019: Install Week

Week four of the inaugural AIRCAT summer 2019 in Tossa de Mar, and everyone is operating in extremis. Under pressure to absorb a new environment, to summon inspiration and express it, we hauled our work and tools into the Municipal Museum for the installation. What goes where? Who gets featured first, second and third? How do we deal with lighting, framing, arranging and coordinating the opening celebrations? How do we communicate our ideas and work to the public? What about the press materials, the audiovisual equipment, exhibition listings and descriptive texts?

No worries, Gerry and I are veterans at this, calm under fire.

Guidelines needed to be drawn. First, we can employ major and minor themes. The participating artists deserve the major notes, their art work are the main acts in the show. We have three rooms, two smaller and one large at the end of the procession into the exhibition. Hints as to what is to come for the major notes pepper the initial rooms, increasing in scale appropriately. In the entrance lobby, a series of portraits and a title piece introduce the show. In the big space, Avital Yomdin and Alberto Barcia sing. Along the way, opportunities and surprises arising from the quirks of the environment are encountered, digested and accommodated. Not a second was wasted.

And all along the way, we focused on finishing with enough time to rest and relax before the culminating opening Saturday afternoon/evening celebration. not easy that, since we were barely able to squeeze out a half day to decompress.