Welcome ToThe Dollhouse
Adam McDowell tours a miniature versionof the Art Gallery of Ontario as it undergoes its transformation
Linda Milrod, Transformation AGO's project manager, oversees the miniature recreation of the gallery, including tiny Elvii.
The fourth and fifth floors of the Art Gallery of Ontario's new south tower appear neat and tidy, with Michael Snows and Betty Good-wins a short distance from a Jeff Wall, a Gilbert & George and Andy Warhol's iconic Elvis I & II from 1963. The Richard Barry Fudger gallery, on the other hand, is a mess. Thomas Gainsborough's The Harvest Wagon lies face down on the floor while priceless 19th-century canvases are strewn about at the opposite end of the octagonal room. In this gallery, you can pull a Brueghel off the wall for a closer look. It is, after all, only a centimetre wide.
"They're not all in the best of shape," admits Linda Milrod, senior project manager in charge of programming for the gallery's Transformation AGO plan. "Things have fallen off the walls."
The gallery has been closed since last October as its Frank Gehrydesigned overhaul unfolds; the AGO hopes to reopen late this year. But before it does, it must decide what art goes where. The challenge has been solved in an endearingly simple manner. Milrod and her curatorial staff have spent the past several months haggling over a dozen foamcore models roughly on the scale of dollhouses. These galleries may be little, but what happens in them is key to the entire $254-million renovation project.
The dioramas are built from blueprints, employing methods and materials familiar to the humblest hobbyist. Gallery employees then use Photoshop to scale digital reproductions of paintings down to Fisher-Price size. They're cut out, glued on to card stock backings and stuck to the walls (sculptures can take a little more work to duplicate; at least one is made from aluminum foil).
Moving the pieces around to suit a curator's whim becomes child's play.
"It's an extraordinary situation. You don't normally find yourself installing 110 galleries all at once," Milrod says, competing with noise from workers' power tools (a constant feature of the closed-forrenos space).
The simplicity of the models belies the complexity of the task at hand. The AGO's permanent collection consists of about 68,000 artworks, of which 5,000 will be selected for installation. The number of potential configurations is practically limitless. "And the collection has grown like crazy over the past
five years," Milrod says. "We're going to have an extraordinary building, but a museum is about its content. That's why people come."
By far the most significant gift to the AGO in recent years was the late Ken Thomson's donation in 2002 of nearly 2,000 artworks, worth an estimated $300-million. The Thomson Collection will be split into three components -- Canadian, European and model ships -- and kept separate from the rest of the gallery's holdings.
For each of the major components of the collection (Canadian art, African, European, contemporary, library and archives, prints and drawings and photography), there is a team dedicated to selecting the art and arranging it in a way that is both aesthe tically pleasing and promotes discussion.
"We've selected work that's considered really great art," Milrod says. "People will see the best of what we have to offer. But it will be organized around ideas that the collection can illustrate and demonstrate. We want the galleries to be chatty places."
An eighth team, the criteria team, is tasked with enforcing the gallery's guiding principles and standards. Its mandate includes everything from fonts to deciding how erudite the display text should be. A ninth team's job is to establish a common feel for the "hubs," anterooms that will introduce each collection.
The makeshift meeting table at the AGO's project office has borne witness to some heated arguments, says a grinning Milrod, involving "lots of challenging, lots of push-back. It's taken a couple of years to get to this point." Debate centres around "particular juxtapositions of works of art with one another," and whether such positioning will successfully communicate a message to visitors about the linkages between artworks. Says Milrod: "There's a lot of discussion about, 'Will the visitor get it?' "
Whatever works are chosen to hang, and however they are arranged, the project manager says the AGO is fortunate to have Gehry Partners' blueprints to work with. "They have designed this building for art," Milrod says.
-Adam McDowell will be checking in with the AGO on a regular basis as the gallery undergoes its transformation.
