An exhibition of my own oddities
A gallery displaying your own idea of art
Picture it. A gallery. White walls. A low hum of polite conversation. And in the middle of it all… my work. My oddities. The pictures I’ve made over the years that even I sometimes look at and think, Well, that’s unusual, I wonder what EXACTLY I was thinking about there?
Pic: Huebert World
The first thing I see in this gallery is a couple standing in front of my photograph of sunlight falling across a wooden floor that I talked about last week.
The man leans in, squints, and says to his partner, “Daphne, do you think the camera just went off by accident?” Daphne replies, “No, I think it’s deep. See, the shape is, like… symbolic.”
I shuffle along to the next frame, empty yellow chairs in pools of light, another moment of quiet from my recent trip around Europe. A teenager walks past, stops, and mutters to his friend, “My nan’s got one of those chairs. Never thought to make it art.”
Across the room, a group are gathered around my shot of a crack in a plaster wall. One of them tilts her head and says, “I think it’s about division in society.” Another says, “No, I think it’s about damp.”
You know, I reckon I’m no different when I’m in someone else’s exhibition. I lean in close, frown thoughtfully, and try to work out what was going through their mind. Sometimes I decide they’re a genius. Other times I suspect they were testing a new lens and thought, ‘That’ll do.’
The truth? A lot of my pictures are exactly like that. A little voice in my head says, ‘Yes, that’s worth stopping for.’
Not because it’s grand or dramatic, but because something, I don’t know, the light, the texture, the angle of a shadow, it just clicks in a metaphoric and physical sense. There’s no grand concept brewing, no years of planning. It’s just… that moment.
But I just wonder: when you put those pictures on a wall, can they take on lives of their own. As solo items, they’re merely snaps, perhaps, but together, they’re a collection of my own oddities, the ones that have caught my eye, and I’ve just wanted to collect them, because they made me smile, or curious, or any number of other reasons.
Have you ever visited the Daily Nice website.
If you look up The Daily Nice on Google, you’ll simply find the following words as a description: The Daily Nice is about my enthusiasm for looking and being. Every day I show a photograph of something that made me happy. Jason Evans.
There’s a real sense of purity to that. It’s another one of those moments where I’m poked in the back by the monster of “Why didn’t YOU think of that idea?”
But perhaps I did, with my oddments of shadows, lonely salty cellars, and empty yellow chairs in a courtyard. I just didn’t publish it.
If you go to thedailynice.com you get directed to one picture, a new one each day. Today as I type, I’m directed to a photograph of security fencing that looks like it is wrapped around an outdoor music festival.
If it were on a wall in a gallery, I might think, “What’s this about? Come on Jason, that’s not art, and the sky’s all burned out.”
By the way, don’t bother looking for that one. It’s gone now, it gets replaced, and you never see the same one twice.
See, he was the real early adopter of posts that give you 24 hours only.
There’s no archive, no story to follow, just one photograph of a thing. A thing that made Jason happy, apparently, and who am I to judge?
Back to the rag tag collection of pictures in my fictional gallery show.
It’d be interesting to have people pop some thoughts down on their way out. I wonder what they’d say and what kind of meanings that may try to attach to the pictures when in reality, like Jason and his pictures, they’re really only, if I can use only, pictures of curiosity, moments that did make me, if not broadly, but wryly smile, or think, ‘oh, look at that.’
I think that’s one of the wonders of having a profession or hobby like photography. We know some kind of wonderful open secret that others don’t. There’s beauty in the mundane. It’s like we’ve broken out of the matrix.
Anyway, I flick through the guest book checking the comments.
“I like the yellow chairs. Are they from Ikea?” Maybe the young lad left that one, whose mum had a chair like it.
“Glad this was a free show.” Charming, I think.
“I thought the upside-down reflection picture was nice.” Oh, that’s better.
“I think the light on the floor picture talks of an artist’s anguish as he navigates the politics of consumerism.” Daphne must have left that one.
As I look further through the book, people start attaching meanings I never considered. And you know what? That’s half the joy. In an exhibition of my own oddities, a photograph isn’t necessarily finished when I click the shutter; it’s finished when someone else sees it and reacts, whether they think it’s profound, or whether they walk past muttering, “I’ve seen better on Instagram.”
And I’d be fine with that. Because in the gallery—real or imagined—you’re allowed to question, you’re allowed to laugh, and you’re allowed to not like it. If every picture pleased every person, we’d have the artistic equivalent of plain white bread.
So if you ever come to my oddities exhibition, here’s what I’d hope: stand there for a moment, tilt your head if you like, the way Barney does when I enthusiastically say ‘Squirrel’, and think about what you see.
And if you walk away thinking, It’s just light on a floor, well, you’re right. But it’s also the floor I stood on, at the exact time of day the light made me stop, and for a reason I can’t always explain… I just said yes to it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stand in the corner and listen for someone saying, “Do you think he’s here?”