Immersive exhibitions that stimulate multiple senses⎯hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, even smelling⎯are common in contemporary art today. Museums, galleries, biennials, and art fairs are presenting work by artists who interweave objects, images, texts, sound, video, and performance into dense, enveloping environments. These presentations physically implicate viewers in orchestrated situations, both inside and outside the institution, where art and ideas coalesce through the direct experience of space and time. Often complex in the making, the work requires artists and their studios to corral a range of skilled resources to produce something well beyond the expertise and confines of an artist’s studio.

This development speaks to the changing characteristics of the artist figure—manager and artistic director, negotiator and administrator—in reaction to expectations of art institutions and audiences who crave more experiential engagement with contemporary art.

Experience It is a conversation series about this shift. In dialogue with visiting artists, the series examines, among other things, the social and architectural conditions of an exhibition site. The format includes conversations between each artist and curator and art historian James Voorhies, as well as viewings of film clips, performances, and images of their work. Experience It aims to reveal why artists choose their given artistic approaches, how institutions support them, and how they imagine their audiences as integral to the art, ultimately arriving at a better understanding of the “it” in the work.

Organized by James Voorhies, Chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, in partnership with Dena Beard, Director of The Lab. All events occur at The Lab and are free and open to the public.

Generous support for Experience It provided by Marv Tseu and Mary Mocas.

Presented by Curatorial Practice in partnership with The Lab.

About Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba is an artist with a particular interest in film and the ways it articulates space. Taking a conceptual approach to filmmaking, questions of composition, physicality of form, and plasticity play an important role in the perception of her work. She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information, and documents, taking them out of the context in which they are normally seen and reshaping and representing them anew.

About the Lab

Located in San Francisco’s Redstone Building, The Lab is a not-for-profit arts organization and performance space founded in 1984. The Lab aims to serve as a catalyst for artistic experimentation.