Covey Bouquet
Covey Bouquet is a hatchling project born from the limitations and learnings of Between Pheasants Contemporary. "Covey" (pronounced like 'lovey' or 'dovey') and "bouquet" are two terms that can be used to refer to a flock of pheasants.
I (Alexander Rondeau) started Between Pheasants Contemporary (BPC) in 2021 when I was living in Northern Ontario. After moving away from the farm to Northern California, BPC programming has become more sporadic, leading me to brainstorm other ways to continue BPC's mission without losing its hyper-specificity that made it such a generative space for artists and curators to work with.
Covey Bouquet is an experimental project space born from Between Pheasants Contemporary's desire to develop off-site exhibitions. Covey Bouquet is spaceless (at least, foreseeably) and will instead take a rhizomatic approach to work with artists and curators to present exhibitions wherever opportunities present themselves: maybe in a garage, a barn, someone else's chicken coop, or storage space? Ideally, Covey Bouquet will operate as a discursive network whereby exhibitions happen in the community/ies artists and/or curators are working within to develop local audiences, then documented and disseminated online under the Covey Bouquet moniker. This means that exhibitions can take place anywhere, and do not need to rely on a traditional gallery model. All that is required to have an exhibition with Covey Bouquet is a space to physically present works, and the capacity to take professional documentation.
As a volunteer-run passion project, Covey Bouquet is not currently in a position to offer artist fees nor financial support for exhibitions. It can however offer in-kind curatorial, writing, and outreach support, as well as assist artists and curators in applying to grants to realize their exhibitions.
Covey Bouquet's programming mandate is open-ended, and aims to be flexibly adaptable to changing sectoral needs and evolving artistic and cultural discourse. Otherwise, programming will prioritize working with artists and curators with fewer presentation opportunities due to myriad compounding sociocultural, socioeconomic, and geographical factors.
If interested in proposing an exhibition -- or even discursive programming or performances -- with Covey Bouquet, please email inquiries to coveybouquet@gmail.com with the subject line "programming proposal". Proposals can be informal, but require a clear articulation of what is being proposed and where it is being proposed, logistical factors, and some examples of recent work to help illustrate.
Of course, Between Pheasants Contemporary will live on and continue to present exhibitions in the coop.
xoxo
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