Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Open House: A Portrait of Collecting

Lauren O'Neal

“Open House: A Portrait of Collecting,” a curatorial project held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2015, is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” The "Open House" exhibition was initially about collecting and caring for objects, a traditional function of museums. Curating with a choreographic mindset encouraged me to address other questions, including how objects and collections foster emotional connections. My initial question for the project, “How to do things with objects?” soon became “How do objects arrange spaces of relation between people and ideas?” Themes include community, memory, identity, taxonomy, preservation, accumulation, value, story, exchange, and display. [This exposition corresponds to Section Five: Arranging Spaces of Relation(s): What Can Objects Do? in the printed dissertation.]

Open House: A Portrait of Collecting

Curatorial Project

Seeking

[Initial Motivations & Context]

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This exposition examines the curatorial project Open House: A Portrait of Collecting, held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2015. The project is part of my doctoral research on Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency, where I propose a choreographic approach to curating: a flexible and generative structure that attends to elements of movement, composition, and exchange within the exhibition context. In Open House, the emphasis shifted from “How to do things with objects?” to “How do objects arrange spaces of relation between us?”
[This exposition corresponds to Section Five: Arranging Spaces of Relation(s): What Can Objects Do? in the dissertation text.]

Project Overview: A Gathering Together

Accessible Exposition (click)