The Reader Newspaper
What Gallery's Art in the Bag
By Sarah Baker
What Gallery's second show took place in a house north of Midtown on Sunday night - not exactly the norm for most openings.
Neither was the show exactly the norm.
Dubbed The Ziploc Bag Art Show, all the work was, predictably, suspended in Ziploc bags of varying sizes. Twenty artists produced work for the show - most of whom are relatively unknown - that took place for one night only.
A small but festive crowd milled around Omaha artist and gallery director Scott Blake's sparsely furnished house. The work hung in the home's main room and trailed down to the basement, where the majority of pieces dangled from the ceilings pipes.
Some of the pieces worked - a number of magnets with lifelike photographs of food zipped inside made good use of the clear baggies. Another, sort of baggie mobile, had each sack holding a Polaroid photograph of a person smoking and, on the back, the cigarette butt in the photo with the brand of cigarette written above.
Blake showed a number of his own bar code pieces - in baggies - the most thought provoking being a flip book the started out as an up close portrait of Jesus and ended with a single large bar code.
Much of the work, however, was amaterurish at best. A baggie duo - one holding a photo of a naked man and the other holding a photo of a naked women, each surrounded by clippings of the photographed person's pubic hair - just seemed trite.
Some of the art wasn't meant to be in baggies - paintings and photographs, for example - and any effect the work may have had was lost once the art was stuffed in a plastic bag.
The show did have the sort of underground, indie feel that many art shows don't offer. It's heartening to see some Omaha artists with enough spirit to create their own venues. Next time, perhaps, the art will live up to the intent.
Originally printed March 2004 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA