Donald Young Gallery

The Donald Young Gallery is located on Michigan Avenue inside the Santa Fe building. With a prime location probably comes a prime real estate cost, and so the gallery is forced to take advantage of all its space. It has a small front room set up like a more traditional gallery, but the rest of the works are packed in a small hallway, around the reception desk, and inside two offices.
The artworks outside the main space are positioned in places that make the viewing experience awkward. To view Rodney Graham’s A Glass of Beer and Vancouver Sun, one has to hang around the reception desk while people are working there. Some works located in the offices are difficult to spot, like bear figurines on the desks, and Bruce Nauman’s work on a computer screen; other works don’t recieve their proper space like Chromatic Modernism and photographs from the Glass House Series. In a business sense, displaying work in an office allows potential buyers to see works in a less formal space. However, the choice to use the offices seems to have more to do with space, rather than curation.
In the front room, works are displayed in a more traditional fashion (white walls and pedestals). The contrast between how works are arranged on the south and north sides of the room is distracting. The south side houses four sculptures arranged by color and size. At the center is Rosemarie Trockel’s Abuse of Beauty, to its left is Martin Puyer’s Facedown and to its right are Joshua Mosley’s George Brown and Freidrich Hayek. Mosley and Puyer’s works face in towards Abuse of Beauty. Mosley’s works are placed next to each other and both given white pedestals. This gives the works a sense of unity, and together they are a comparable size to the other two works. The north side of the gallery is not as neatly arranged, and the disparity between the two sides of the room is distracting. It needed to be one way or the other, both was just weird.
The current show is not worth going to see. However, the next exhibition in September will be of Dan Flavin’s work. It is a little surprising to hear his work will be on show, and it will be interesting to see what kind of space solutions the gallery comes up with. While they may have been able to get away with work in offices during the current group show, it will be near impossible with his work.