CHICAGO — Like Chicago Expo drew hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of visitors to Navy Pier over the weekend, another art fair took place across town on a much different scale. Now in its third year, barely fair features all the excitement, drama and aesthetics of a contemporary art fair, all at one-twelfth the size.
The exhibition is the brainchild of Josh Dihle, Tony Lewis, Roland Miller and Kate Sierzputowski, co-directors of the artist-run project space Julius Caesar Gallery near Garfield Park.
“We recognize that there are a lot of miniature galleries, across the country and around the world, and that’s a function of some of the art market squeeze forces in the art world,” said Dihle, taking a moment to usher her School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) students around the fair to engage with Hyperallergic.
“People try to do these things with no real profit margin or are forced to do it in very restricted ways, and art fairs, on the other hand, are ramping up in this Goliath stuff,” he continued. “So we kind of wanted to lean into that and satirize it a bit – the larger art world and the big art fairs – with our miniature version.”
Irony or not, the organizers, exhibitors and artists at Barely Fair take their jobs seriously.
“We are very aware of the realities of the art market,” said Miller, also present and overseeing the final details before the opening. “And art fairs are important, but also so ridiculous. While Barely Fair satirizes the whole situation, we also want to try to create a platform that elevates artist-run project spaces.
This year’s edition features 36 exhibitors, including international gallery owners, who sign up to participate on a sliding scale, from $150 to $1,500 for a booth. As accomplished miniaturists already know, working smaller doesn’t mean working cheaper, a grim reality that Miller and his co-directors continue to sidestep as their odd idea grows into a small institution in its own right.
“It’s crazy that even on this scale, an art fair’s finances still don’t work out,” Miller said.
The numbers may be excruciating, but the results are delightful, with each exhibitor presenting a slightly different take on the miniature art fair concept. Some have opted for the perfect facsimile, like the Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey, who presented a collection of meticulously framed prints and a three-and-three-quarter inch bronze sculpture of works created in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artist Jimmy Wright (who happens to have an exhibition of life-size works currently exhibited at the gallery); or Scherben, a Berlin space showcasing new work by Jens Rønholt Schmidt and Die Kette, which points to scale only leaving the edge of the ruffled paper intact where a drawing has been torn from a sketchbook .
Others took an immersive installation approach, such as the Basket Shop Gallery in Cincinnati, which featured a kind of natural landscape by Jaime Raybin and RD King composed of dichroic film and fluorescent polyethylene and populated with cut-out paper deer and other wild animals. The Latent Space, a literally latent gallery (having recently moved from Chicago to Los Angeles), presented a dark, perfectly sized micro-playground by Sayre Gomez. Gomez wasn’t the only big name at the fair, as the Pickleman booth featured “Mini Bean” (2006), a tiny replica of Anish Kapoor’s iconic public sculpture in downtown Chicago, made by Kapoor himself. even.
Beyond the delights of small artwork and adorably tiny scenes, there was plenty of room for surreal takes – once a miniaturist abandons ideas of scale or verisimilitude, things immediately get weird. London-based COB presented an installation by Victor Seward, consisting of six acrylic and enamel daisies, a realistic 3D-printed resin fly and a realistic gypsum slice of bread in an arrangement of everyday subjects that revealed deeply strange. Bread also played a role in Patrick Mohundro’s installation for Lonesome Dove, a project space located in an alcove under a porch in Ridgewood, Queens. Five of Mohundro’s six flowers were made of stained glass and roofing nails, but the sixth and central one incorporated a Wonder Classic hot dog bun. The gallery added a folding chair and a small-scale table with a miniature stack of work lists, to complete the odd juxtaposition.
Several gallery owners were present to comment on the particularities of setting up a mini art fair stand. What first appears to be a lark quickly becomes a serious question of who to invite. “When you put on an exhibition, you think about the artists you love and how that works in the space,” said Jacob Barnes of London and Berlin gallery Grove, which presented a four-person exhibition by C. Lucy. R. Whitehead, Johannes Bosisio, Filippo Cegani and Brittany Shepherd. “But for something like that, it has to be someone who can work on a large scale. It was fun to come to this question – how do we reimagine what we do at this size and make it all work? »
While Barnes admitted that the cost of international shipping was much lower made it an attractive proposition – not to mention the possibility of doing something more experimental without risking losing the investment in an art fair booth. typical $10,000 – dealing with such small works also had its own set of dangers.
“You don’t worry so much at a regular fair that someone steals a giant painting,” Barnes said. “But I have to keep an eye on my tote bag or someone might walk away with the whole collection!”
As with any fair, there was more to see than space to mention – but unlike Expo Chicago, which has come and gone, the Barely Fair will be there for one more weekend until April 23. , with a program including Minor issues, a small symposium on economies of scale. For exhibitors or visitors who find the art world overwhelming, Barely Fair is an opportunity to approach it in small bites.
