SEA AND SPACE EXPLORATIONS
Director & Founder
participatory project • place artwork • 501(c)(3) non-profit art gallery
Los Angeles, CA
June 2007 - August 2010
seaandspace.org

Description
What is/was Sea and Space? An artwork. A gallery. A place.

Sea and Space is a gallery Bank founded in June 2007 that operates as an artwork. Bank considers it a Place Artwork, which she defined as a spatial location to be occupied by the artwork, statements, and thoughts of others. In this case, the others were artists, guest curators, lecturers, and collaborators. Bank's role can be described as Director of the gallery and Context Developer of this artwork. Bank carefully crafted the mission, the format, and the operations from its inception and then refined much of this with the advice from our Board of Directors over time. From 2007 - 2010 this was a solo project with the support of a board of five, which formed after the first year.

Programmatically, Bank ran this project under a simple theory that if you represent challenging projects where the people that make them live and work, then it will draw in others who also make strong work, who can then be shown. This continued to compound and appeared to be limitless. Bank chose to operate on an alternate model to a commercial art space. Her goal was to foster, through appreciation and support, artistic practices that are dependent upon alternate means for visibility. She did so with the certainty that without such forms of support, artists who make work that is not marketable due to conceptual, political, formal, or social differences will remain culturally undervalued.

MISSION STATEMENT

The sea and space are uninhabitable and inhospitable regions, yet they are essential to life. We navigate these environments using technology that provides only a dim understanding of what is both familiar and unfamiliar, easy to see but impossible to fathom. They are targets for conquest whose expansiveness resists us.

These two spheres bracket us, literally and metaphorically as representatives of worlds beyond, portholes into what we have yet to discover about ourselves. They are grounds for exploration and intense risk-taking; we rewrite and restructure our world with what we find.

Sea and Space Explorations strives to create a hiccough beyond the binaries of good and bad, market constraints, and notions of progress, where artists who are genuinely engaged in the specificities of their own practice can come to take the risks that are entirely their own. This space will primarily be dedicated to artwork that has historically been termed "conceptual," "theoretical," "political" or "alternative," terms that are loose and applicable to all media. Sea and Space vigorously supports the autonomy of artists, lecturers, guest curators, and collaborators, especially with regard to the presentation of their work.

GOALS

1. To steer towards work that resists capitalization as the gallery operates as a capitalist critique of sorts.

2. We seek works that are either relational, collaborative, large scale, ephemeral, video, performance, neo-conceptual, or in traditional mediums that would have a really hard time fitting into a commercial gallery.

3. We aim to support work that is marginal and not as supported due to content, scale, longevity, or conceptual reasons.

4.We are deeply committed to work that has strong content with little visibility.

5. We support artists and their endeavors over objects. The space is more of an exploratorium or experience for artists engaging within their practice than it is a gallery.