Gift Shop
2000 • page 1 of 2

 

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1. Field Museum gift shop - O'Hare Airport

2. Boston Museum gift shop-Logan Airport

3. Metropolitan Museum gift catalogue ad

4. Brooklyn Museum website


5.Winnipeg Art Gallery gift shop


 
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Project description • GIFT SHOP

This project was commissioned by the Winnipeg Art Gallery as a complement to their exhibiting of Camera Obscured: Photographic Documentation and the Public Museum in October 2000. The request made by the museum's then-photography curator, Shirley Madill, was to examine the WAG's institutional photography archive and to create a site-specific installation to be shown at the same time as Camera Obscured.

Early on in the research process a section of the archive was discovered that was devoted to photography of the Gallery's gift shop and the products that were sold there. Two things were stiking about this - first, that so much of the photographer's time was assigned to documentation of what were essentially commercial products - some related to the gallery's collection and some not at all - and, second, that the photographic technique used to document these products was very similar to that used to document the gallery's collection (this included Inuit art, craft and contemporary art).

The strategy adopted was to mix together documentation of gift shop materials and collection objects without any obvious distinctions being made - gathering all of the objects found inside the gallery's walls as a aspects of material culture. The intention was to raise questions about the rationale for the hierarchical categorisation of "things" (for example, what factors would relegate one Inuit carving or print to the gift shop and another to the collection?). Unconventional "captions" took the form of a set of photocopies of the negative envelopes, bearing the photographer's

 

hand-written instructions and description. All of the 70 photographs were printed to 16 x 20 inches, framed identically, and presented in clusters in the transitional public spaces throughout the museum/gallery. It must be noted that the Gallery's chief photographer, Ernest Meyer, generously opened his photo studio picture files to research and co-operated fully in the production of the Gift Shop exhibition.

Over the past few decades gift shops in many museums have grown in terms of square footage (the WAG's gift shop had been renovated and expanded twice since the gallery's opening in 1971), physical locations (with satellite sites in airports, for example) and, with the advent of the internet, an increasingly substantial presence on museum websites. The phenomenon has reached a critical mass that has also allowed one particular commercial enterprise to open stores that resemble museum gift shops without the inconvenience of actually having a museum attached. Historically, the original purpose of museum gift shops was to act as an educational extension of the museum/gallery. Goods on sale were related to an institution's collections in some way.

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