Zero Point

Three other willamette valley photographers (Jon Muyskens, Andrew Yip, and Jeff Conley) and myself joined together to create a booth at the Corvallis Fall Festival.  While we were accustom to showing our work at galleries, we knew little about participating in an outdoor arts festival.  Our biggest challenge was to design and build the booth.  There are many fancy ‘booth systems’ that artists can buy, however they are expensive and heavy, and we really didn’t know if we’d be doing this more than once.  So we set off to Home Despot and priced lumber and potential wall covering materials.

We settled on a making panels 3 feet wide by 8 feet high framed out with 2′ x 2’s in a truss design.  We then stretched thin gray outdoor carpet over the frames, stapling it in place.  The panels can then be connected together on site to make a longer wall using bolts, washers, and butterfly wing nuts.  This design worked very well in practice, was portable (the individual panels can easily fit in a small truck),  light weight, and cost far less that commercial booth systems – though it’s likely not as durable as metal framed display walls.

Booth wall frames mocked up without the carpet. The L-shaped wall on the right is made up of four panel frames bolted together.

Here Jon and Andrew are working to stretch the gray outdoor carpet tightly over one of the panels.  We found that numerous staples (about 2″ centers) were necessary to keep the carpet from sagging.  We also put a few staples into the front face of each panel to hold the carpet tighter to the frames.  If the staples are carefully placed in the grooves of the carpet they minimally mar the display surface.

Andrew and Jon are stretching and stapling the carpet on a panel.

Andrew and Jeff are finishing up a few last minute touches to the booth before show time.

A bad phone snap of some beautiful prints in our booth.

Two wonderful customers browsing our card wall

Because this was our first outdoor art festival show, this took a lot of effort to pull together.  However now that we have our lightweight portable booth ready to go, we may show up at another festival somewhere on the west coast (especially after the economy has recovered a bit).  If you stopped by our booth during the festival – thank you!

This entry was posted Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 12:08 am and is filed under Shows. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.