Last night was the opening of the "Dentro y Fuera de la Pared: 7 Artistas del Otro Lado" exhibition at Mexicali Rose. I've no shots from the opening (I didn't feel like walking from the border to the gallery lugging my camera bag with me) but I've been sitting on some pictures I took to document the building of my pieces. I also took a couple rough snaps of them after they were installed.
The blueprint:
Makeshift 60° clamps:
Clamps in use:
Gluing, step by step:
Painted:
Then came the printing:
Drilling holes in plexiglass, not as challenging as I feared it'd be:
And finally installed:
These are titled "No-Color Wheels." They represent a combination of two ideas. One was an early proposed concept for the show which would've had each of us exploring the ways we use color in our work. For me, of course, color doesn't enter into the equation, so as a cop-out I thought I'd shoot subjects with recognizable colors (fire extinguishers for red, traffic cones for orange, etc.) and see if presenting them in their natural order (red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet) would be enough to let the viewer connect the dots. The other idea was a long-gestating interest in documenting a continuous cycle and displaying the resulting images on a structure that mimicked that continuity. Each panel of each hexagon, then, corresponds to one of the six primary and secondary colors, and presenting them in a sequence with no starting or ending point (supposedly) maintains their cyclical nature. Originally my plan was to hang these structures in the middle of the room, thus allowing viewers to walk 360° around them, but the ceiling wouldn't hold the screws so I had to resort to hanging them close to the wall where the screws could be drilled into that wooden rail on the ceiling. Bummer.
