Most gallery openings simply ask for your attention. Dealer Pietro Alexander‘s inaugural exhibition asked for your attendance at a wedding. Thirty minutes before the doors opened to “The Wedding Show,” the dealer married writer and filmmaker Sara Apple inside his new eponymous SoHo gallery. The gesture lent a splash of sincerity to a moment often defined by industry spectacle, folding a real-world love story in with an art-world curatorial statement.
The exhibition took its cues from another famously public union: Tiny Tim’s 1969 wedding to Miss Vicki on The Tonight Show, a televised event which drew 45 million viewers, and called into question the notion of performed intimacy. That tension has animated “The Wedding Show,” which brings together works by West Coast artists including Billy Al Bengston, Jaxon Demme, Ken Price, and John Altoon alongside New Yorkers such as Cristine Brache, Ryan Brown, and Tallulah Dirnfeld.
For CULTURED, featured artists and wedding guests alike offered up some guide rules for creative relationships, where the art of staying committed—to a person and a practice in tandem—is rarely straightforward, but always worth the trouble.