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A convergence of things” is how Kevin Rice describes his workday as Registrar and Associate Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. As registrar, he documents and keeps track of the gallery collection; as curator, he creates exhibits from the collection. Combining these tasks, causing things to converge, is BFA-trained Kevin’s aesthetic work.
After twenty years in the gallery, Kevin says, “The collection continues to excite me. I can still find out new things about works…” His knowledge of the collection as a registrar connects to his passion for drawing from it as a curator. “If you don’t use a collection,” he says, “its value in some respects diminishes. Collecting something for the future is important, too, but to use it makes it valuable, in my mind.”
“Works that are not often seen, I try to pull out,” he says. Glassed-in display cases in the concourse at the Confederation Centre allow him to draw from more than one category, to “juxtapose things not often seen together.”
“I think there's a large amount of aesthetic decision-making,” he says. “[Creating an exhibit] forces a framework on it. It’s not the same as making a painting, but I start with sketches on paper, to think about the relationship between viewer and object and the relationship between elements. It may seem formal to do it this way, but for me, very often it’s visual: What it could look like as a presentation for the public. Then logistics come into play.”
As an illustration, he describes a current display in the concourse that brings together a range of figurative works: a Robert Harris life study (“a lovely figurative painting of a nude, one of the finest life studies he’s done”), a Maxwell Bates painting (“fairly expressionistic”), a piece of contemporary pottery (“a big bowl with abstracted but figurative images—it seems to be about mass and volume, but the decoration is specific”), a Portland vase (“a copy of a famous Greek artifact, with classical figures that tell a story”), and a photograph of the vase’s original owners (“just a couple in an interior space that relates to the objects—just a document from the file that’s a great photo, though it’s not recognized as an artwork”). “Variety,” Kevin suggests, “can jar people into thinking about objects in a new way—not only formally, not only thematically.”
“My area in curatorial projects is a new look at old stuff.” Kevin says, unassumingly. “Over twenty years, you see changes in how people view things,” he reflects. “There are lots of small examples, when you see someone look at a piece of art and they say something that makes a lot of sense, and you see that it means something to them…
“At one point, I used to think of the gallery experience as one person looking at an object. It could be that this was just my wrong thinking early on, but I think [the viewing experience] has also changed,” Kevin says. “Now, I see that it is more social, more based on engagement.…Now, it's more about how those people talk together about something they see.”
The way a contemporary artist’s creativity “causes projects to happen”; the way a contemporary curator uses a collection to bring ideas together: these facilitate new way of viewing art objects in a gallery. Kevin says, “I get the feeling it allows the potential to talk more about issues sparked by that artwork.”
He continues, “A great piece of art is made to be seen over many generations and can be seen differently over those generations—without losing whatever was key to the initial response to it.”
In his quiet way, Kevin Rice, the registrar, documents the gallery collection, making data about art and artists available for today and for the future; Kevin Rice, the curator, makes the objects themselves speak to each other in the gallery, so that we, as gallery visitors, will speak to each other, too.