This conveyor belt has spent a long time feeling confused about its purpose in life. It still felt like a 'found object' as opposed to an artwork I could yet call my own - all I had done to it was build new legs for it. It sat in my studio for months waiting to be used in some way, wondering how it was to be repurposed, waiting for a space that was big enough to properly display it.
In my final crit, I asked whether my classmates thought I should stick any images onto it, as that was what the vinyl prints were intended for. I showed them a few layouts and options.
The verdict was no. Leave it blank. The reasons being that the movement and noise and the presence of the object itself are enough. The blank white surface asks a question, challenges the viewer, etc etc. Covering it in colourful images would make it too busy.
I took their advice, because that's what crits are for.
However. Once it was installed in the exhibition space, set up alongside the work Mass Produce that is undoubtedly the main event of the installation, things changed.
This work was always meant to take the back seat - its function is mostly to house the reflectors for the sensors. But everyone who came through and saw it all agreed that it needed something extra. In the middle of a big empty room, there was no real danger of it looking too busy (like it did while stored in a tiny studio crammed in with the work of 6 other students.)
Thank goodness for Andrew who came in x2 days before deadline while I was laying out the potential images, and we had a chat that went like this...
Him: Have you decided whether you're going to stick these on it?
Me: No, not yet. Everyone said it was enough on its own, but now I'm not sure.
Him: I don't really get it. Let's say you leave it blank; what does it do when it's on its own?
Me: I guess it moves... and it makes noise
Him: But is that the sort of art you make? Art that 'moves and makes noise'?
Me: No! You're right! My art is all about translating images... and I love colour...
Him: Well then, there's your decision.
Lightbulb!
I spent hours trying to decide how to lay out the images. Sorting them by colour, size, country of origin, and trying to order them in a way that seemed like 'organised chaos'... It all felt wrong.
Then I realised that every single item I had a box for was also featured somewhere on the black conveyors immediately behind me. Another lightbulb moment! I used the order that already existed within the other work me to determine the chronology of the box images, starting from the seam line of the white conveyor belt, so they too are organised by season, forming a cyclic system that makes so much sense. This decision provides yet another subtle factor which connects the two works by making them refer/'speak' to one another.
One day before final deadline: calling my dad (who is an engineer) to help with the fact that the rollers of the white conveyor were out of alignment and the belt was pulling over to one side and bunching up. Rollers re-aligned, crisis averted. Then a day spent cutting out and applying the stickers.
Crisis number two: the catch was that several of the stickers were printed on a different kind of vinyl, one which was less adhesive than the high-quality optic permanent vinyl, so they began peeling off when the conveyor was on and moving... I guess it just wouldn't be my art practice if I didn't encounter one disaster after another.
The day of our final hand in and I'm going to the factory again to re-print the images on a better type of vinyl. Hopefully I can re-apply them in time, on top of everything else to do...
But I'm glad this work now feels like it's mine. It has my touch - colour, representational imagery, design, logic. It makes use of the stack of boxes that I've been collecting all year from the back alley of my local greengrocer store, Jack Lums, and which I have constantly said I will not present as readymades because my practice is all about translating images in ways that conceptually alters them in some way.
My favourite parts of these boxes are:
The neon text on the 'Flavor grown tree fruit' box - 'May be treated with, in any combination, fludoxonil, dicloran, dcna, fenhexamid, propiconazole to inhibit old. coated with food grade beeswax, vegetable, and/or petroleum based wax to maintain freshness'
Organic bananas with a logo for 'Primus Labs' - grown in a lab, but no mention of a farm?? Plus the temperature logo immediately above it that looks like a beaker
NZ Capsicums clearly bound for Japan because of the katakana heading 'Gorume Papurika' (gourmet paprika)'; also the peppers with a silver fern inside them. (I used to live in Japan so I feel like this is a slightly autobiographical touch...)
'Sweet Deal' oranges - another reference to the 'gambling' connotation in Mass Produce.
I have decided to use 'Sweet Deal' as a title for this conveyor belt on its own. 'Mass Produce' refers to the wall works; however this is also the title for when the two works are presented together.
Final notes about this work...
I think the duality that it provides is extremely important.
Firstly, the two elements of this installation are literally and physically connected by the sensors and reflectors. There is an interdependence: Mass Produce would not be able to move without the other work returning the signal, while the movement, and the orientation of the images and text of Sweet Deal draws the viewer to the side, from where they will activate the movement of the other work. Each work guides the viewer to properly experience the other.
It's a very manipulative arrangement - the viewer is essentially steered through the work. Their movement is designed, like in the layout of an airport (as Simon Denny points out, discussed in my essay) because making the viewer walks between the two works is vital. (Strain suggested using tape along the ground or rope barriers, but I prefer this design component that anticipates choices rather than literally directing them.)
This year I have been working with two types of x ray imagery - medical radiography, white on a black background, and airport scans, colours on a white background. For this reason alone there is a sort of yin-yang relationship between the works and processes embodied in them.
There is also the clear idea of 'outside-inside'. One depicts the packaging, the idea of 'outside', which both conceals and advertises its contents with colourful cartoonish eye-catching designs - a facade which is appealing and potentially misleading. The other depicts the idea of inside, cold and colourless, truthful, scientific, sceptical.
In this way it becomes about questioning possible discrepancies between what we see and what we know - what is depicted to consumers, and what is hidden from them.
Edit: I printed some new stickers in time, but the curve of the conveyor means that wherever it stops, the print resting on its edges will develop wrinkles. I've decided simply not to worry about this. They look like the corrugated texture of the cardboard, anyway.
If Elam has taught me one thing, it's how to embrace such imperfections - they just show the process.
