Kitchen Drawer Gallery
Kitchen Drawer Gallery is an intimate rotating exhibition space that takes up residence within an available drawer in the host’s house. The first exhibition is titled “Leftovers,” and is sited inside an empty kitchen drawer in the artist’s home. Three interactive doors can be pulled open to reveal a lighted interior space made from detritus gleaned from the artist’s home, including cardboard packaging, tin foil, and adhesive vinyl. The Lilliputian landscape is reminiscent of models of futuristic cityscapes, as well as the discards of children’s craft projects.
Kitchen Drawer Gallery takes its cue from similar alternative exhibition spaces such as the Terrain Biennial, Barely Fair, or Womanhouse. While the construction of falsely quotidian spaces in white cube environments has become common to the point of banality, in siting a gallery inside the homes of volunteers, all participants (the artist, the host, and the audience) are invited to reimagine the role that art can play in a genuinely quotidian space. Hosts may come across the gallery accidentally during their everyday lives: during the day while a toddler is playing, in the evening while a family pet is sniffing for crumbs, in the middle of the night while fixing a snack. This gallery also offers a radical reimagining of what it means for artwork to be accessible. In visiting this gallery, there is no need to expose oneself to the public gaze, nor is there any need to find childcare, to set aside financial resources, to move one’s schedule around opening hours or to worry about whether or not the space is accessible to those with disabilities. While fewer people may ultimately experience the work shown in Kitchen Drawer Gallery, those that do experience it will have a more intimate relationship to the work; a relationship unmediated by the requirements and expectations present in a traditional contemporary art space.