Friday, April 3, was supposed to have been the opening reception for the Alternate Paths group exhibit…..but no.  As with the rest of the world, our community has been impacted by coronavirus, and though we are not exactly on lock down here in Rochester, NY, the ‘New York State On Pause’ executive order has required all non-essential businesses to close, and has prohibited public gatherings where social distancing measures aren’t possible. Thus, no opening reception.

The show was installed a couple weeks back, on Saturday, March 14, which was just days before things started closing down locally. (Seems like ages ago now though….) We actually briefly debated if we should put the show up or not; the crisis was just emerging which made everything feel up in the air, but the studio was still open. So we decided to go for it.

Everyone pitched in and the show went up pretty easily in just over an hour. Considering we had work by five different artists, of all different sizes, and that we hadn’t seen each other’s work before we got to the gallery to install the show (thus it wasn’t pre-sequenced), this was a feat. And if you’ve ever installed a show before you can appreciate this!

Special thanks go out to Danielle at the studio who helped with tools and hanging, so we were all able to split up and take different walls. Here are a few photos showing us installing the show, the gallery lighting and the space.

As soon as the exhibit was up, in anticipation of the fact that we might have to postpone or even cancel the opening reception, I did a Facebook Live video of the show, and then made a short iphone video to share on Youtube (7:22 min).  We were all in agreement that if it made sense to cancel we’d cancel, but we still wanted to have a way to share the work.

In the end, the studio closed about a week later, and though the show is up now til May 1st, there’s no way to see it in person. We are still hopeful things will improve so our ‘closing reception’ (scheduled for that Friday, May 1st) will give us the chance to celebrate the work together, in person, with all of you.  We are also talking about possibly extending the show a little longer, and I’m working on making more videos to highlight the work of each artist. Stay tuned for more details!

In the meantime, hope you are all staying safe and healthy out there!