The Outdoor Shower Gallery
Dumbo Arts Festival
NYC circa 1999
*Documentation appears! These shots above and below found in a shoebox in a garage in Arizona…
SUMMARY: The Outdoor Shower Gallery, corner of Water Street & Main, Brooklyn, Dumbo Arts Festival, October, 1999. For the four day festival, I created and installed at the festival’s main intersection a freestanding elevated functioning shower that served as a wet gallery for mini exhibits. Gallery goers could either don a raincoat with rain hat or an umbrella while they perused the mini-gallery within. A media team spontaneously showed at one point, adding an extra cinematic flare to the proceedings. Construction details and Gallery Exhibit Guide below.
CONSTRUCTION & WATER LINE: The platform: I built a tiled 3 1/2′ x 3 1/2′ platform elevated a foot off the ground using 2 x 4s, plywood, grout and discarded tile. From this platform rose the frame of four 8′ two x fours connected at the top by two by fours. This served as the frame for the shower curtain and anchoring posts for the exhibits. I ran a hose from inside Smack Mellon Gallery to the Shower Gallery that ran up to the top of the structure and connected to a shower nozzle that rained down on each gallery goer. The curtain: A motley woven mesh of found fabrics, a patchwork quilt of a curtain.
The Gallery: See below for the *official* original Gallery Guide destributed on site. A mini-multimedia exhibit with a few interactive components. These included a fingerprint exhibit, an exhibit of exotic fruit, a series of poems, and a video called “making faces,” where a series of faces start in a normal stare and gradually distort into the grotesque then flash back to neutral. Gallery goers had a choice of using an umbrella, a rain coat with hat or braving the inclements as they saw fit.
The Crew: Gallery support offered by Ransom Corp members and friends, in particular, Evelyna Dann (seen here in pictures in the plaid skirt), Kathi Von Koerber, Zemi 17. Support crew helped gallery goers don gear, not fall and to not take too long of a shower!
GBK & The Ransom Corp present
The Outdoor Shower Gallery
*Umbrella provided (or raincoat!)
DUMBO Arts Festival 1999
SW corner, Main & Water, Brooklyn, NYC
This opening of the Shower Gallery features nine new exhibits:
Scenes from the post-apocalyptic flower garden. Metal wire flowers by Derek David. These flowers were originally created as props for the film “The Post-Apocalypse.” Derik David, found of the The Chicken & The Egg Race, is a New Zirk City freelance artist & puppeteer. Through sculpture and storytelling, he captures the animal natures that exist int he human subconscious.
Left out shade. Three photos by Coralie Anna Bausch (c.a.b.). She say they were “an accident.” I say they are blue. See more of c.A.b.’s work exhibited in DUMBO at 57 Front Street, 5E (The Fuission Show).
Small Gifts. This is an assemblage of small handmade gifts given to the gally curator GK over the past year.
Sensational Fruit. Whole and mutilated fruit by GK. When this edible cosmic exhibit appeared in Washington State two years ago it was censored for being “offensive”” to the apple growers in the region. Let’s see what Brooklyn has to say.
One Word Horoscopes. Loud Josh reads your stars. Loud Josh is a one-word poet & strength experimenter living in downtown Manhattan. He will be performing his latest piece OX at Smack Mellon Studio (56 Water Street) on Nov. 13.
Evidence. This exhibit will be done by you – or it won’t be. Fingerprints.
“Making Faces” by Kathi von Koerber with help from Nielli, Zemi17 & co. Video shorts of faces telling stories as they progress through subtle, grotesque and profoundly emotive expressions.
“Hangman” by agent mT with guest hand. Video short that profiles a new take on an old game.
Origami Cranes by Everglade. Why don’t more people do origami? Everglade lives too far from me yet has a knack for small folds in small paper.
The Outdoor Shower Gallery is the concept of GK and was built with the help of Mustache who has already hopped on a Greyhound bus headed for Kentucky. GK is the co-founder of the Ransom Corp., an NYC-based performance collective and event production crew. Thanks go out to the man with hair above his lip. Also thanks to Joy & Steve, DUMBO Maestros. And special bows to The Task Force for Inventive Philanthropy (TFIP) for generously backing this exhibit.
