s p a c e
In gathering material for POST, as I mentioned yesterday, I have once again been revisiting past work - work which I am tired to death of looking at. Yet, I am finding a new significance in the Arturo maps particularly in light of what I have been thinking about recently.
After putting away the science aspect of the Portillo project, and the fiction of it, what I am left with are images which show a craving for space - open space. Back in 2002, when I was looking at and making all those topo maps I was gravitating towards representations of open land and water. I had tried to make some street maps at the time, but they never worked. I was wanting the openness.
Jumping ahead to last year, feeling supremely stuck I started making the horizontal paintings (for lack of a better description).
They are landscapes, kind of, but again I was craving space - this time in a more real way: space to physically live in and space to do what I wanted.
So lately, much because of the class I'm taking, I've been thinking about space in the city, especially the spacial distribution of North Philadelphia. There is this great contrast in scale: you have these old industrial buildings, which are of course huge, and then right inbetween them tracts of housing that look miniature in comparison. The river is near by, as is I95, which between the seagulls and the looping highway ramps makes it feel as if we are pushing off the very edge of the city.
The notion of space and our place in it is starting to take shape. What is particularly exciting is thinking back to how I started with the Arturo maps. I was playing around with some 35mm slides my dad had given me of histological sections, projecting them and tracing the cellular shapes. These tracings became the beginnings of Arturo's topo maps. I remembered this yesterday in that incredibly boring meeting because some very positive (meaning very brown) immuno-stained sections were up on the screen.
Nice how everything comes full circle when you are battling sleep in public. Maybe my little pretend company name, SpaceAged Beef is more appropriate than I had intended it to be.
After putting away the science aspect of the Portillo project, and the fiction of it, what I am left with are images which show a craving for space - open space. Back in 2002, when I was looking at and making all those topo maps I was gravitating towards representations of open land and water. I had tried to make some street maps at the time, but they never worked. I was wanting the openness.
Jumping ahead to last year, feeling supremely stuck I started making the horizontal paintings (for lack of a better description).
They are landscapes, kind of, but again I was craving space - this time in a more real way: space to physically live in and space to do what I wanted.
So lately, much because of the class I'm taking, I've been thinking about space in the city, especially the spacial distribution of North Philadelphia. There is this great contrast in scale: you have these old industrial buildings, which are of course huge, and then right inbetween them tracts of housing that look miniature in comparison. The river is near by, as is I95, which between the seagulls and the looping highway ramps makes it feel as if we are pushing off the very edge of the city.
The notion of space and our place in it is starting to take shape. What is particularly exciting is thinking back to how I started with the Arturo maps. I was playing around with some 35mm slides my dad had given me of histological sections, projecting them and tracing the cellular shapes. These tracings became the beginnings of Arturo's topo maps. I remembered this yesterday in that incredibly boring meeting because some very positive (meaning very brown) immuno-stained sections were up on the screen.
Nice how everything comes full circle when you are battling sleep in public. Maybe my little pretend company name, SpaceAged Beef is more appropriate than I had intended it to be.
posted by beef at 9:03 AM
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