Weekend Show

This past weekend the Monochrome Guild hosted our annual show.  We rented some space from Harcourt House Art Society.  The space is heavily used during the week.  We only had a small window in which to set up the show, host it, and then clean up.  Most of the Guild members met at Harcourt House on Saturday morning around 8:30AM.  When we walked into the room, it was completely cluttered with furniture and "stuff" from the drawing class that had been held there the night before.  We moved out tables and chairs and easels and platforms and began to organize our prints.  

Some of my prints had just been printed a couple of days prior.  Less than 150 hours before the show they were still wet in trays and then the washer.  During the week I scrambled to get them mounted, matted and framed, as well as to look after many of the other supplies for the show.  Like usual, I was right down to the wire... but ready.

After clearing out the drawing room we began to hang our prints.  It was only a few minutes after noon, the scheduled start time of our exhibition, when we finished.  We sat back and relaxed and waited for our guests to arrive.  Initially we were not flooded with visitors and we took turns making certain that someone was manning the show at all times.  There were a few scattered visitors through the afternoon but by late afternoon they started to arrive in more significant numbers.  It was difficult to keep an accurate count with people constantly coming and going but I estimate that we had about 75 people wander through on the Saturday.  We shut things down about 11:00PM and I headed home to unwind and get some sleep.

The next morning I slept in, and then headed back over to the show for our scheduled noon opening.  I didn't really expect a lot of people to show up on Sunday, but was pleasantly surprised by the numbers.  I thought that most guests would attend on Saturday, when we were hosting our "wine and cheese" reception.  But, through the day on Sunday, we had about 40 more guests.  It was well enough attended that we decided to put out more refreshments and had a second informal reception.

There were a total 67 prints on the walls for the show, and 8 photographers included work.  There are actually about a dozen members, but four were not able to take part this time.  The work that was shown was mostly silver gelatin prints.  This is an artsy way of saying a traditional enlargement made by projecting a negative onto light sensitive photo paper and then developing it.  Some of the group members work with alternative or historical processes.  This included collodion wet plate [tin types], albumen prints, bromoil prints and toned cyanotypes.  The show was pretty well received so we will look to put together another one in a year or so.

By 5:00PM on Sunday afternoon we began the cleanup.  It only took us about an hour to pack everything up and put the room back to the way we found it.  We passed on all of our leftover food and all of our empty bottles and cans to Colin, the homeless guy that lives out back.  He was very appreciative.