‘Virtual’ is a tricky word, and these days it has significant meaning. Over time, at least since the beginning of the internet, we have been like little ants who run all over the place and create their kingdom underground where one can’t see it. Humans in comparison have also created a kingdom that can’t be seen by the human eye, unless you enter a computer gateway; a cyber world of wonders, a world with unlimited space, a space of endless directions, no apparent gravity, and many personal possibilities of existence. It’s a ‘virtual’ world, a place that does and doesn’t exist at the same time, a conundrum of thinking, a three-dimensional impossibility, an amorphous mass sitting and waiting to be molded into more significant nothingness. So ‘virtual’ has enormous significance, a revolutionary new reality, unheard of in our past, non-existent in say 1850, and yet more enormous than any other modern entity today. Virtual reality, an inexplicable place, is as small as your computer screen, or as big as the universe; click, now you see it, now you don’t.
‘Bricks and mortar,’ on the other hand, is mostly the complete opposite. A story where the earliest neolithic ‘wattle and daub’ was woven, encouraging over time a move to more lasting building materials, where heavy natural rocks were encouraging more manageable bricks, and finished limestone, where concrete held things together to keep gravity at bay, and structures in place, ‘in the flesh’ as they say, and not some airy-fairy imaginary ‘virtual’ world. ‘Bricks and mortar’ has been done for centuries and is solid in many senses of the word.
Five years ago, the Board of the Existential Art Gallery of Scarborough, less formally known as ‘Gallery X’, committed intentions, aims, and objectives, and a set of corporate not-for-profit by-laws, to the building of a substantial bricks-and-mortar art gallery for Scarborough, of which its population would be most proud. Then along came the pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there were few, if any virtual galleries in the whole world. In fact, director Ortansa Moraru’s suggestion that we pursue a virtual art gallery was very unique and caught the imagination of the board directors when the pandemic seemed to be a complete roadblock to an immediate direction to bricks and mortar. This new tack led to the creation of a gallery website, galleryxscarborough.com, with virtual exhibitions of local, national, and international flavour.
Readers will know that presently there are all kinds of virtual exhibitions of everything one can think of, including many virtual art exhibitions. Plenty of local, national, and international organizations have found that virtual exhibitions lead to a much greater audience, in fact, The World is the audience for exhibitors and it doesn’t entail the comparatively large costs of a bricks-and-mortar gallery exhibition. In Canada for example our major art societies, The Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, The Society of Canadian Artists, The Ontario Society of Artists, and The Sculpture Society of Canada, have all hosted online virtual exhibitions of their major shows. The same is true for individual artists who had their own virtual exhibitions.
There are many advantages and disadvantages that accrue to virtual exhibitions. For example, the works are all digital pixels rather than made up from their original media, size becomes almost incomprehensible unless one searches for a title label, and there are no congenial opening nights where people discuss the works and enjoy each other’s company.
So here we are at the end of the pandemic, where people are meeting again, and flesh and blood, bricks and mortar exhibitions are once again possible. The thing is, will we ever reach that goal again? Have virtual exhibitions won the day? Can we get back to our older but honest intentions? Do artists and the people of Scarborough want that architectural and unique cultural expression that comes as part of a substantial new art gallery for Scarborough? As you can see here, many cities have staked a claim to beautiful brick-and-mortar cultural expressions in the past.
Does ‘bricks and mortar’ trump the ‘virtual’? Over the next five years of our striving, we are going to find out!
Peter Marsh CSPWC OSA SCA TWS
