The Gift Shop
by Matthew Offenbacher
Matthew Offenbacher's The Gift Shop with orange risograph prints is layered on black and white images of work in the exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery's museum gift shop of Seattle. Matthew Offenbacher with these exhibitions asks the questions: What can an art exhibition do? How can artists work together? Who is the audience for an art exhibition? What responsibilities do artists have towards their audience? What responsibilites do audiences have? What is the relationship between artists and the institutions who support them? What can we learn from each other?
Museum gift shops are fabulously liminal places. They sit in the middle of a complex web of transitional space, shifting methods of discourse, utopian and practical considerations, different understandings and misunderstanding of the purpose and function of art.
