…and they even come in eight different flavours!
100thgallery has a home!
100thgallery has a home and its everyday name is 49 Porter Street Prahran. It is just fifty short metres from Greville Street and the Prahran Train Station. This property has caused no end of drama and headaches for the past 6 months, but all of that is behind me now as I have the keys!
As you can imagine, 100thgallery’s first space needed to tick a number of boxes.
- not expensive
- at least 50sqm
- not expensive
- not on a retail strip
- not expensive
- close to public transport
- not expensive
I also wanted 100thgallery’s first space to be a little ‘out of the way’ and in an area that was cool, but not too cool (as too cool = big amounts of cash). Greville Street is one of the cooler ‘strips’ in Melbourne. It is forever evolving and has always been pretty good at bespoke offerings, whether it be music, fashion, food & drink, or something else quirky. Porter Street is the one-way street that runs along the train line between Commercial Road and High Street, intersecting Greville Street at its middle.
Tick!
49 Porter Street is one of five commercial/retail/office properties at the base of the ‘pret-a-porter’ apartment building about 50m north of Prahran Station and Greville Street (on the Commercial Road side). It is 5m wide and 10m deep… enough to be divided into two or three smaller exhibition spaces. For Prahran, it also wasn’t too expensive.
Tick, tick and tick!
As Christmas/New Year are upon us, trades people are taking a well deserved break. This means that 49 Porter Street won’t be turned into 100thgallery until January at the earliest.
Watch this space for progress reports and photos!
Until then it will be hanging sheets and carpet picnics!
taking a short break
As we are now well immersed in the season to be jolly, I’ll be taking a break from regular blogging on this website until just after Christmas.
Have a great festive season and I’ll see you in 2011!
a creative odyssey
This post is a part of the Creative Odyssey Blog Hop organised by Jess from Epheriell Designs (epherielldesigns.com). Kudos to Jess for organising such a wonderful gathering of like-minded individuals!
The idea behind this ‘blog hop’ is that each day 1 or 2 people will share their creative dreams and goals for 2011. Today, I share the stage with Blacksburg Belle.
As many of you know by now, I resigned from my corporate job, and from my corporate life at the end of October. I had spent way to long stuffing my creative dreams and goals into a cage, keeping them suppressed so that they wouldn’t interfere with my ‘normal’ life.
- waiting 2010
As I now know, there is only so long that you can do this for before the cage lock breaks and dreams bubble to the fore. My dream has always been to be ‘artistic’ for a living. Whether it be painting, drawing, or writing, I feel most content when I am creating. I wish I was musical so that I could add it to the list, but alas I am not!
Whilst resigning from corporate life gives me the opportunity to revisit my creative dreams, I have found myself in a new and interesting place. I spent about 17 years in the corporate world before taking this chance. I don’t think that this is right and I don’t think that creative people should have to ‘postpone’ their future.
So, whilst I still may chase my own creative dreams in 2011, my actual focus will be on helping others achieve their creative dreams so that they don’t have to lock them away.
2011 will see the opening of 100thgallery in Prahran Victoria. 100thgallery will be a gallery that allows artists to rent space to exhibit their creativity. 100thgallery will not be interested in whether artists have had previous exhibitions, nor will we be interested in average selling prices.
100thgallery is a ‘serviced office’ type concept that artists can rent a part of (or all of) on a fortnightly basis. Aspiring, emerging, and established artists are all invited!
My creative dreams and goals for 2011 are:
- establish 100thgallery within the emerging artists community as the first place to exhibit
- exhibit at least 50 aspiring/emerging artists
- open a second space by the end of the year
- open studio space to encourage artists to gather and create
- hold my own exhibition of paintings
My measure of success is for 2011 is simple… a long waiting list of artists wanting to exhibit at 100thgallery. If this is you, please email me at charles@100thgallery.com.
the fit out
Provided all works out with the property in the New Year, this is what I have planned for the 100thgallery fit out. The kitchenette is already there, so all I need to do in January is –
– have the concrete floor polished
– build three interior walls
– install the hanging system
– install gallery lighting
– paint the whole space
– put 100thgallery on the window
– hang some art
– have a grand opening
Too much for one month? Almost certainly, but let’s give it a go!
PS. Each room below is 5m across x 3m deep.
not to be… not today
Today was d-day for getting the keys to one hundredth gallery’s first space. I left home at 8am to do the cross-town drive at the height of peak hour. I arrived in Prahran just before 9am; enough time for a cheeky coffee before the real estate agent office opened their doors.
The office opened on time and I was handed an envelope with the keys to one hundredth gallery’s (pending) first home. However, before I could leave the office to do my final ‘final’ inspection, I received a phone call from the agent (who wasn’t at the office yet) to let me know that nothing had been done during the weekend and all of the previous tenant’s furniture was still there. Worse still, he did not have timeframes for when it would all be moved. Fail. Epic Fail.
With many companies closing up shop for Christmas, this means that we will not have the keys until 2011. Hopefully, very very very early 2011. Provided we still get access in early January, we still should be able to open our doors in February. This is only a small speed bump on our journey. We will open our doors in 2011 and progress our vision and mission to represent and launch emerging artists.
Watch this space for further details!
tomorrow is d-day
Monday 13 December 2010 is d-day for getting the keys to our first gallery space. All has NOT gone well in the lead up to tomorrow and the past 6 months have been a bit of a nightmare (see ‘the property’ post). Our ‘final’ inspection on Friday revealed a space full of office furniture, files, missing light fittings and a general mess. To make matters more interesting, the front door was blocked with lumps of concrete, chairs and other office equipment (I think someone was trying to prevent us access but can’t be sure). To our bewilderment, there were also people moving things into our future storage cage, rather than moving things out!
All of this meant that the ‘final’ inspection ended up being the ‘second last’ inspection. The final inspection will now be just after 9am Monday morning. If all is not okay, a fairly large spanner will be thrown into our works. Hopefully I’ll have good news to report after 11am. Wish me luck!
contact me, or else
So Charles, what happens if you can’t find emerging artists to display their art in 100thgallery?
Easy – I’ll explore my egotistical self and display my own art!
Do you have enough art to fill 32 linear metres of wall space?
Not yet, but I have enough pent-up inspiration to set to work whilst the gallery fit out is being done.
Sounds like a lot of work.
I don’t think you can call it work. Spending hours on end painting in my studio with Ben Harper and/or Jeff Buckley, with a bit of Lisa Mitchell and Prince on the side is not work… it’s a pleasure to be doing what I love.
So, that’s it ladies and gentlemen! If you’re not going to take the next step and launch your artistic career, I’m going to ‘plan b’ and will exhibit my own work to progress my own artistic career!
the marketing strategy
Opening one hundredth gallery presents some immediate marketing challenges as we have at least two primary markets that we need to continually communicate with.
These are:
1. Artists
Without art, one hundredth gallery will just be a room with really good lighting. One hundredth gallery needs artists to display their art. There is no shortage of artists around, but how many of them are willing to take the next step to display their talents? I sincerely hope that they all will! Art shouldn’t be kept in private… it should be publically available for the whole world to see.
Apart from asking artists to come forward via this website, facebook, and twitter, I will be aligning the gallery with universities, TAFEs, and some high schools (especially the ones with large art departments). I will also be approaching artists directly, so look out!
2. Public
Without the public, one hundredth gallery will just be a room full of art. One hundredth gallery needs the public to come through the doors to appreciate the talent of our emerging artists; and if compelled buy a piece (or two) to take home with them.
For emerging artists to truly emerge, their work needs to be viewed, critiqued and bought.
One hundredth gallery will be going on the PR trail as soon as we have set an opening date. We will be telling our story to whoever will listen… the papers, journals, magazines, bloggers, websites, etc., etc. We are also building a mailing list and have an evolving presence on facebook and twitter, as well as the blog/website you are reading!
The next step of course, will be to explore real-world advertising opportunities such as bills, postcards and whatnot. It goes without saying that until the gallery is full of the works of emerging talent, there’s not much point just advertising the space. A little chicken and egg, for sure – but that’s half the fun, right? The point is we’re not of the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality – we’re aware that there are two audiences here that we need to attract, but for rather different reasons.
inspirationism
The year was 1993. I had learned the art of etching and my teachers and peers had convinced me to let go of realism and explore expressionism. So I started etching some weird and wonderful things. All done with thin lines and enhanced with pen and ink. My free flowing thought connected to my etcher (can’t remember if this had a proper name) and produced a heap of symbolism, some of it with intentional meaning and some of it sub-conscious thought. Friends and peers asked me if they could score some of the acid that I was on (I wasn’t by the way) and teachers loved the originality of what I was creating. My prints were sent to Japan, came 2nd in a Royal Melbourne Show thingy, and got me some great grades, including my only perfect score.
Due to the (apparent) high level of symbolic detail in the prints, I was always asked what they meant; what I was thinking when I did them; and what I was trying to express. My answer changed depending on the day, and depending on who was asking the question, but the common thread was that they were just free flowing expression without intention.
I needed a better answer. So I started answering these questions in the following way… ‘It’s not really relevant what I was thinking when I did it; what I’m most interested in, is what does it mean to you when you look at it?’ Genius. I had just worked out how to legitimately answer this question with a question!
Very soon after this, I started my own art movement. My work didn’t fit into the expressionist, impressionist, cubist, or surreal schools, so I named my movement the ‘school of inspirationism’ and registered it as a business. As you all know, inspirationism now ranks as an equal with all other artistic schools that came before it and is also taught at all of the top schools and universities. I also have an Aston Martin made of pure platinum.
Inspirationism will live on at 100thgallery. Not because it is a movement unto itself, but because all art ‘inspires’. Art inspires change, it inspires emotion, it inspires thought, it inspires action, and at a minimum it inspires us to say that we can do better.
If you’re interested in having a look at some of the old ‘inspirationism’ stuff, please check out www.inspirationism.com. This website still exists as I never took it down and is still hosted on an old iPrimus dial up account… yes people, dial up.