If you’ve ever felt uncomfortable entering an art gallery, fear not: Victoria’s newest gallery is coming to you.
Ryan Thompson, a printmaker and co-publisher of art book company Anteism Publishing, has spent the past two years imagining, constructing and transforming a white moving truck into a mobile gallery.
OuterSpace Gallery makes its official debut Saturday as part of the Integrate Arts Festival.
“I know some people get intimidated walking into a gallery, feeling they really don’t know anything about the system or the art,” Thompson said. “Just being on street level, [OuterSpace] should be a lot more open.”
From the moment Thompson inherited the truck from a friend, it was clear he’d need some guidance in terms of mechanical work and design. But thanks to the ingenuity of his father, contractor Gary Thompson, it has come together creatively.
Light and sound are powered through solar panels; the inner walls are covered in sheet metal, with frames held in place with strong magnets to avoid wall repatching after a show; and the duo is now designing and hanging shelves using cables and magnets.
“It’s been a process all the way through, from the flooring to the electrical,” Thompson said. “I had a lot of help from my father and the project couldn’t have come together without his knowledge.”
The Integrate Arts Festival is a two-night art crawl that will see 23 of the city’s galleries open their doors today and Saturday.
OuterSpace will be parked outside the Greater Victoria Public Library’s Central branch on Broughton Street for the festival’s daytime event, called The Play on Words Book Fair. It runs between 1 and 5 p.m.
And it won’t be the only gallery-on-wheels making its debut at the fair: The PedalBox Gallery is a bike-powered art gallery organized by the Victoria Youth Council, which features works by artists ages 25 and younger.
For Thompson, launching OuterSpace is a way to get around some of the barriers that typically face emerging artists and curators in the city.
“The cost of rent in Victoria makes it next to impossible to run a gallery showing the type of work I’d like to show,” he said.
While his intended media is diverse — from painting and photography to printmaking and publishing — Thompson’s target artists are all emerging and making work that might not be suitable for a commercial venue.
For the launch this week, OuterSpace hosts work by London, Ont., artist James Kirkpatrick (a.k.a. Thesis Sahib).
“He’s a pretty prominent graffiti artist turned gallery artist,” Thompson said.
Kirkpatrick is also a musician who makes his own instruments out of toys and other electronics he finds, through a process called “circuit bending.”
He has designed a graffiti mural on the outside of the truck, which will also be filled with about a dozen of his paintings, as well as one of his instruments, which visitors can try out.
Anteism also launches a new art book of Kirkpatrick’s work at the show, which serves double duty as the show’s catalogue and the first in a series called Lineage Editions.
“Basically, it’s almost like a chain letter, where we invite an artist [to be the subject of a book] and then they choose the next artist who we will publish,” Thompson said. “I think it will be interesting to see over the timeline who they choose and how they’re related.”
For the book fair, Thompson has also curated a public library of art books by various publishers.
For now, Thompson says he plans to keep OuterSpace attached to events.
Next month, the truck will role into Artlandia, the visual arts portion of music festival Rifflandia, outfitted with a new “publisher spotlight exhibition.”
Books published by Koyama Press, a comic, zine, graphic-novel and art-book publisher in Toronto, will be on display alongside original artwork from the books.
But Thompson said he hopes to engage with the City of Victoria to explore other options for future shows, given the legal no-man’s-land of a mobile gallery. As a commercial truck, it can legally rent parking stalls for now, he said.
“It’s halfway between a food truck and a busker, so I don’t think they really have a way of dealing with it yet. So I’d like to work with the city to maybe develop the idea,” he said.
