EMILY LANCTOT

The Sale: DeVos Art Museum & Vermont College of Fine Arts

The Sale took place at Fern Place Art Space (Marquette, MI), The DeVos Art Museum (Marquette, MI) and at The Wood Gallery (Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT)  in 2010.

 

A yard sale is usually an invitation for the community to visit a personal/domestic space and to rummage through your rubbish or soon to be cast off items. By moving this kind of sale into a museum or gallery space and extending the time, a rummage sale can mimic and give insight into the work that goes on inside the institutional space.

 

Using the same methods of advertising as someone might use to promote a yard sale encouraged new visitors. People who had never set foot in the museum came inside. New visitors and community members interacted with the caretakers of community culture.

 

Each week new items were thematically selected (curated) for the sale. All of the objects were given away in exchange for an image of the new owner with the object and answers to a couple of questions. These questions and the photo documentation replaced the objects in the museum until the next sale.

 

The documentation of the project was meant to mimic the museum - a place where archives are built, stored and accessed. While in the installation the documentation is available for a time, after the sale is over, that documentation becomes less accessible.