Exhibition Copy: Roman Ondak, Stray Man
Performance and video, 10 minutes 46 seconds / 2006
“The Stray Man” is a video by Slovak artist Roman Ondak that shows a man repeatedly looking into a gallery through a window, but not entering it. What is the man doing there? Is he doing anything at all worth mentioning? Is there more to this than just a passing gesture in daily street-life?
Roman Ondak was born in 1966 in Slovakia where he still lives and works. His work is often discreet, tongue-in-cheek, conceptual, and regularly invites the participation of others. He often questions the art world and its established quirks like exhibition spaces, behaviors like queuing and looking, labeling, visitor experience, and any misplaced preciousness about authenticity or authorship.
Roman Ondak, The Stray Man, video still © Roman Ondak & Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
Exhibition Copy
A series of solo exhibitions.
By seven internationally renowned artists.
In six uncommon locations.
Along the same street.
February 2024 - April 2025
LOUISE BOURGEOIS - February / March 2024
ROMAN ONDAK - April / May 2024
ROULA PARTHENIOU - June / July 2024
IMIN YEH - August / September 2024
LYNDON BARROIS JR. - October / November 2024
RYAN GANDER - December / January 2024 - 2025
MARTIN CREED - February / March 2025
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Exhibition Copy is a rotating series of solo shows by seven artists.
Each artist is invited to respond to the idea of the exhibition copy, a term often referring to a duplicate of an artwork fabricated because of a lending artist or institution’s reluctance to put an original work at risk.
Exhibition Copy also copies an exhibition space as Gallery Closed is multiplied into adjacent homes and businesses along a half-mile length of Lowrie Street.
Each exhibition will take place simultaneously in the public facing windows of six Lowrie Street locations. The venues include; Gallery Closed, a former beauty salon, a public notary office, Ron’s Pizza Palace, a private home and an elementary school. Each artist’s project will be exhibited for two months in all six locations, at the same time.
This exhibition series invites seven artists to interrogate ideas of authorship and the original by using the exhibition copy as a means for expanding the experience of a single artwork across multiple sites and contextual shifts.
Curated by Jon Rubin, Phillip Andrew Lewis, and Lenka Clayton
