When did you start curating?

When did you start curating, and what was the first show you did? 
Tell me all the ins and outs, the challenges, the discoveries, the triumphs.

How it started:

I started to curate my own work in 1998.  A friend of mine, a graphic designer, encouraged me to combine the celebration of my birthday with my first solo exhibitions. 

Sponsorship:

The challenge of this particular exhibition was to  convince professional business people to sponsor my own birthday!

Venue:

I got the venue as free in a Japanese restaurant (NIGIRI) and it was such a successful exhibition that the owners of the place decided to dedicate part of the restaurant for use in promoting art from local artists. 

Prints and Images:

All images were printed in a manual process involving two laboratories black and white and colour. The theme was interesting   enough, it was a combination of fashion catwalk and music show.  Lots of well known people turned up, and definitely it was a special occasion to dress up. 

Team:

I was dealing with people I really trusted, and for that perhaps was the first time I had the opportunity to treat my work in a professional way.

Public Relations:

A PR company was working to support the event sending press releases for journalists. I had a lot of good material published, lots of articles and a video with special moments.

Promotion of Work:

The whole exhibition was produced very well for a first show, but it was a learning exercise and I gained a lot of experience putting the whole event together. Some details like for example, not advertising (by that I mean,  to local dealers) the images as well as I could have done.

Can you talk about the things you learned when doing this, things that you didn’t realize or hadn’t experienced, as an artist?

Staying in charge of all the processes made me realise how intensive and demanding is to put together an exhibition. To curate my own work in a way is easy because my choice for the images is by heart in addition to looking for highlights in my style. 

I realised that to be a curator requires much more than just choosing images, it involved lots of reading, searching on the web and having and utilising a very good network of contacts.  Some of these skills were new to me.

How does the curating experience influence your own art?

As a photographer I think my art influenced the curate process.  When I visualized my own style as a photographer and my passion for photography plus my skill to organize exhibitions, I had a great desire to further my career.  Despite the difficulty I had in transitioning from film to digital, I had more time to concentrate on my own body of work.

I realised curating  is about writing and explaining the complete process of the project as a photographer. But as a curator dealing with another artists work its all about searching and understanding the background of the artists. Both have a positive influence in my work.

why do you want to be a curator in the first place? Wouldn’t you rather just have someone else facilitate your art and the art of others?   

I do want art dealers or curators to promote my work, but having the chance to work with the new generation of photographers  and highly skilled  traditional photographers  makes me  fascinated with the curating work  process.  I’ve developed my own style as a photographer and been a curator of my own work. I know what catches my eye. For that reason I will open my own gallery in the future to promote Brazilian photographers in Ireland.

 I am guessing that curating creates community — do you think this is true? Can you talk about the need for community that artists have?

Yes. Definitely there is a community of curators. It’s great to be able to share our experience and knowledge and information amongst us.

       






Can you talk about how curating opens up the artistic world for you, how it keeps you plugged in, how it keeps you learning? If those things are true…?

Being part of this artist world means reading, searching on the internet, attending lectures, seminars, conferences and setting up my own web presence, and at least but of no lesser importance it’s to be a member of organisations and associations related to curating and of course attending as many exhibitions as possible. Curating opens up the artistic world to me, and in doing so makes me more mature and in tune with my work, this keeps me learning and plugged in.