What would this city look like if the “pop up” idea was to be adapted to an art movement? Where one day there would be nothing on a vacant lot and then the next day there is a sculpture. To think about the possibilities is boundless. Fortunately, in Buffalo when you even start to think about these ideas, before you know it they are in front of you… literally. One of the next public art movements could come in the form of an initiative called The Momentary Museum.
Here’s the story behind the project, as told by Candace Camuglia, one of the founders of the museum, as well as the person behind Casual Science.
“The Momentary Museum is an ongoing project intended to fill unused and/or unexpected places in Buffalo with art installations, most of which will be interactive. Some pieces will remain where they are popped up to interact with elements and passersby while other projects will be taken down, only to be viewed for a short time. The locations are decided upon project by project, as we discover or are presented with options.
“We recently completed a project with Sugar City and the NFTA for the “Ride the Metro Round and Round” event. We put out a call for work featuring iconic Buffalo elements from local artists, isolated them from their background to turn them into essentially big stickers, from which we dangled from the ceilings at the Humboldt/Hospital subway station before two large scale photographs of empty lots. We then invited people to pull the dangling stickers and rebuild Buffalo on these empty lots. This piece was taken down but has been donated to Sugar City, to be displayed whenever they find their new home (please help them). Photos from this event will be posted within the week on our Facebook page.
“This Friday, on the Day of the Dead, will be the reveal of the Momentary Museum’s second installation, which will be modern day Vanitas style altars erected in the back room at Black Dots Records Shop on Grant Street. We are inviting people to come to the opening and bring memorabilia of people they miss or loathe to honor/dishonor them at our altars as an act of emotional release, not often experienced in our modern world. The reveal of the altar will feature appropriate noise music by Oxygen Starvation. The altars will be up for the first week of November and we are inviting people to visit the altar and leave remembrances at them all week.
“We are working on some projects for the winter, one involves constructing several igloos all over empty lots on the Westside, filling in the empty spaces with “seasonal housing”. We are also continuously looking for empty and accessible places to fill with energy, especially those where we might be able to leave installations behind. We have some plans for next year when we have dry grass again to build movable pop-up galleries within empty lots. These will be a combination of moving shows to be erected over different lots as well as shows with particular themes relating to locations. Our aim with this project, is to fill in the unused spaces of Buffalo with all the energy its people have. We want our neighborhoods to match our fire! AND we want it to be communal, not necessarily limited to artists of Buffalo, but to anyone who happens upon it.”
The Momentary Museum projects are the blood, sweat and tears of myself, Candace Camuglia, and Lisa Brown.