Day Two: Sunday: The drawing at the Aldrich Art Museum.
At end of our residency all the tape is destined to be removed from over twenty sites and turned into a new shape and make its way back to the museum. These reconfigured tape piles will be put on display in front of a mounted photograph of what the tape looked like in its off-roll state and intentionally spread out to look like some form of representational drawing. It's still the drawing, just a lot more compact.
We are often asked "what happens to the drawings when you are done with them". Well, firstly, we are never ever actually done with a drawing. Some drawings continue to haunt and pester us for years to come and there are days that you would do anything to actually be far removed from a drawing that is demanding to be written about (like now) or organized or emailed or backed up or processed in some way. The most common consensus is that a removed mural, once turned into a ball of tape, essentially is only trash. Trash with an awesome short history, but trash nonetheless. We got to discussing the relationship between this hypothetical trash and our work, and the short life cycles of these murals. As this discussion unfolded we paced back and forth in front of the long vertical wall framing one side of bathroom hallway. At the end of this hallway is a window looking out at the entryway to the museum that greets visitors with a spectacle in metal: an elevated rusted bulldozer tilted at a 45 degree angle up toward the sky. Discussing the ideas of our trash art and staring at this bulldozer the drawing in the museum became a self-fullfilling prophecy.
The bulldozer was brought back to life and operated by one of Colin's friends who is an incredible thinker, poet and critical art thinker. Before the bulldozer is a literal heap of tape balls drawn as a collection of circles of different sizes, shades of green and tape widths. To really bring home the garbage pile action we had to introduce a small collection of seagulls circling above. The inclusion of a free-roaming shape gave us the tools for leveling out the composition and breaking the mural off the flat plane of just one wall. The birds can be anywhere.
We had been informed that all the tape balls that were coming back to the museum would be placed on rods extending from the wall. The mural was laid out so the bulldozer anchors the right, the tape ball trash pile is on a diagonal in the middle, and a blank space was left on the far left for the upcoming documentation and the balled up murals.
