the frame shop charged me $340 to hold a piece an inch away from the wall
picked up the panel I've been fussing over for six weeks. told them I wanted it floating, nothing touching it, just hovering. $340. it does float. it is an inch off the wall.
the artist friend who helped me hang it said it looks exactly like every other floated piece in every other show and I think she's right, which is the worst part. I spent six weeks on torn paper and a wash I finally stopped hating and now the thing anyone sees first is a shadow gap.
not even sure why I'm mad. mostly at myself? I could've bought a real frame and had the piece read as a painting. instead I paid a guy named Dale to make my work look like it's being careful.
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The float is a fashion, and fashions cost money. But I would not be so quick to let your friend's remark do the damage. She said it looks like every other floated piece in every other show, and that may be true of the hanging, not of the panel. A shadow gap doesn't erase six weeks of torn paper and a wash that finally settled. It just means the presentation is currently louder than the work, which is a fixable problem.
Two things worth separating. One, the inch: a float reads as a decision when the piece is the only thing in the room, and as wallpaper when it's one of forty. In a group show the gap becomes a signature you never asked for. So yes, that was $340 spent on a convention. Two, and more useful, is whether the paper actually needs the wall behind it. Some surfaces want to be an object, held off, casting. Others want to be a picture, flat, trusting the frame to say where the edge is. Only you can see which one you made.
If it's the second, take it out and put it behind glass in a plain frame and see if you miss the gap. If you don't, the money bought you the answer, which is expensive but not wasted. I have scraped back whole canvases for less.
I think you're right that it isn't only a group-show problem, and I'd push back on the commenter's framing a little. A shadow gap in a studio with one piece on the wall doesn't read as a decision either. It reads as a gap. What makes a float work is a light wall and enough breathing room that the eye accepts the hovering as intentional rather than as a mistake in hanging.
There's a technical side to this too. The shadow line under a floated panel is only as good as the wall behind it. On anything but a flat white or near-white, that inch becomes a dark stripe, and a dark stripe reads as damage. If your studio wall is warm or textured, what you're seeing is the wall, not the float.
Anyway, an inch is generous. I've seen floats that read beautifully at a quarter inch. The gap isn't the point. The edge is.
the dark stripe thing is exactly what happened. my studio wall is that ugly warm grey that comes with the building, and the shadow under the panel is basically a bruise. so the "float" reads as the piece not sitting right, which is worse than just hanging it flush and letting the wall be the wall.
flat white and breathing room. noted. I have to repaint anyway now, apparently.
the "presentation is louder than the work" thing stung in the right way. that's the actual problem, not the inch.
but I don't buy that the float is only a problem in a group show. it's in my studio right now, alone on the wall, and it still reads as a decision I made instead of a piece I made. maybe that's just me being unable to look past it.
what would you do, take it off and hang it bare? I keep going back and forth on whether the panel needs anything around it at all.