The Research Studio in the 21st Century

Friday evening I went to the Maitland Art Center to see the opening of RS21. I knew one of the exhibiting artists namely Kelledy Francis having met her at the Kerouac House. Kelledy exhibited some of her couture dresses from her Four Seasons series. She had planned to hire models and have them standing in a small man made pond out in the Maitland Arts Center court yard. However heavy rains were predicted so she decided on a more fine arts approach to exhibit her dresses. The three dresses seen in this sketch are hung from the ceiling by thin wire. The seasons represented are Spring, Fall and Summer. A woman in a gold dress expressed an excited interest in the dresses and I hope she and Kelledy had a chance to talk.
The three people sitting at the table were there for quite some time. It turns out that the woman typing was transcribing everything the young couple was saying. They were actually part of the exhibit put together by Kim Walz. Kim explained that the transcriptions were being fed wirelessly to a large screen in the exhibition room as were live texts messages. She apparently also had speech recognition software which would then print gallery goers conversations in real time.
The cutting edge exhibit and installations were created in the spirit of the work started at "The Research Studio," founded by André Smith in the 1930’s. The show runs through July 13th 2009.