Great-looking Utah show riffs on ideas of research, curation and art theory

This project takes a little explaining but bear with me. Utah-based design studio Number 04 spent six months researching how to mount a museum exhibition, exploring everything from different kinds of pedestals and which typeface is best suited to marketing, to how to light the show. This resulted in a 1,000 page catalogue that brought together all of the studio’s findings printed on baby pink paper. But for the show itself (at Utah’s Museum of Contemporary Art) the book is nowhere to be seen – instead it has been transformed into photographs, sculptures and installations that Number 04 (aka JP Haynie and Davis Ngarupe) has created based on the information they’d collected.

“Although the viewer is not privy to the information, the results are manifested through images and sculptures included in the exhibition,” says the gallery, but of course there’s no way of verifying this claim which adds another dimension to this interesting exploration of the relationship between research, action, curation as theory and in practice. Also the actual artefacts seem to provoke us viewers – are we witnessing a celebration or a subversion of the curatocracy?