Exchange

One thousand and one drawings lined the gallery walls of the Philadelphia Sketch Club. Belinda Haikes created an experience design with small artworks made over several months which she offered in exchange for something. The Flash Salon at the Sketch Club is experientially a short show, about a week, time is an integral element to the success of the exhibition. Compressing months of information into days of presentation creates it’s own meme, the data must be an easy packet to upload. ‘Exchange, take a little drawing, leave a little something.’ Creating a conversation with the audience using a visual language of cues and messages gives the installation liveness.

The artist encouraged visitors to take a drawing in exchange for something else. Drawing the visitor into the visual conversation cleverly concocts a cluster of memories into the artworks. Memes are packets of cultural information, each drawing is the opportunity to set a fractal like pattern into motion. The collection morphs from Belinda’s memories into the collector’s experience with the work.

Social practice art invites the viewer to break the invisible walls that make art hard to understand. Exchange is easy to explain and pass onto others like a swirl of a fractal that repeats itself endlessly. The combination of images and narratives is sweeping and naturalistic, with an active element of social improvisation.

Belinda Haikes, Exchange, Philadelphia Sketch Club, Flash Salon

Belinda Haikes, Exchange, Philadelphia Sketch Club, 235 South Camac Street, The Avenue of the Artists, Center City, Philadelphia, 19107, 215- 545-9298

“Flash Salon is a solo exhibition of very short duration, anywhere from 5 days to 9 days, in our historic main gallery at PSC in Center City, Philadelphia. It is a PSC juried show open to all, but specifically targeting pre-career artists and curators in the Philly area. You could be the next N.C. Wyeth, who had his first exhibition in this same space.” – Philadelphia Sketch Club