FINAL INSTALL - 'Sweet Deal'

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.

Another option

These would be printed on vinyl stickers like the boxes and cut out around the edges. The idea is to depict food packaging - no actual food, but just the containers it comes in - colour coded based on the material, as per the airport customs security scanners. This would bring in ideas of materiality, food waste, consumerism... Also, they wouldn't need to be x-rayed as the vinyl stickers themselves bring in the element of transparency. The images would be photographs of food waste found at elam and at my home. Just another option...

White conveyor belt - options

A few different test layouts using the vinyl stickers I printed my box images onto:

1: separated

Here you can also see the new legs I made for the conveyor belt! The other ones were different heights so the surface was on an angle.

2: overlapping
Because the stickers are transparent, and I have more than enough to cover the full surface, there is also the option of having them overlap slightly...

or arranged with slight tilts:

Documentation: in preparation for visiting artist crit

Judy suggested in the middle of the year that I try printing on other surfaces, and that I try to incorporate movement. The idea of a conveyor belt came up in that discussion.

How cool that would be - to print onto a conveyor belt. So I had this grandoise idea, but no idea if, or how, it would ever come to fruition...
Then, the stars aligned. Someone just happened to be selling a supermarket conveyor belt on Trademe. It was cheaper than the other ones listed, some of which were industrial, thousands of dollars, but this one was still quite an investment. I went for it. And I feel really excited about the installation I have in mind for it.

As a test for the visiting crit, I wanted to hang it on the wall, but this poses some problems as it's 50kgs. Hanging it sideways - horizontal - was the original plan. When I emailed the manufacturers (all conveyor belts in NZ are custom made, and the ones I bought have handy ID numbers and it turns out they are still under warranty - awesome) they pointed out that, thanks to the inconvenient force of gravity, if hung sideways the rubber belt would slip down and possibly get damaged. So, vertical it was.
After a lot of discussion with Pete about how the wall mount could be achieved, I set to work. I measured it all up; went to the north shore to buy some steel; learned to cut, drill, bend and weld; and with these newly acquired skills, made a bracket to connect to the back of the conveyor belt and hook over the top of the wall...

Bend it like Beckham

I also had to find a reflector that would work with the sensors that attach to the motor. The manufacturers told me to buy a certain kind, because the maximum range of the sensors depends on which kind of reflector you use. I emailed a few electronic shops and, after receiving a few curt 'no's, finally managed to track one place that had the right kind.

This can be 3 metres max away from the sensor

And the other advice in their email was super exciting. I'd asked whether the electric circuit could be customised so that when switched on the conveyors could be displayed rolling continuously, and whether the speed could be adjusted. They informed me that this would be a terrible idea because the motor would overheat. The way the sensor works, though, is that it only triggers the rotating motion when the reflection is disrupted. Then, it will rotate for about 10 seconds, or until it is disrupted again.
This is because in a supermarket, or other shop, you want the movement of the conveyor to stop as soon as the customer's goods reach the edge by the cashier. So that's where the sensor is placed. When something reaches that point, the movement is halted. When that object is removed, the conveyor moves again... and the next item comes along, breaking the signal, pausing the movement again.

Meaning that the conveyors will be stationary until someone comes close enough, breaking the signal. Just walking past the work will set off the rotating motion. And it will stop moving if you stop and stand in front of it.
A work that is activated by the viewer!! I'm so excited about this.

Documentation: Corn on acrylic

These were test prints on scrap acrylic. They caught the supervisor's eye in my cross-group crit a couple of weeks ago, and were passed around, with some surprisingly positive feedback.

In terms of colour, I think the print above is the most successful: opaque white on translucent black. By comparison the yellow ink in the other two gets lost, but there is enough contrast in the one above to clearly see the image. And there is something noticeably medical about the x-ray on dark tinted acrylic. 

The above is printed on clear acrylic. The sheet was left over from when I did laser-cut honeycomb patterns and prints at the start of the year. At the time this attempt was a hot mess. We quickly realised with this one that it was the wrong type of plastic, hence the melting and burned effect and incompletion. I held onto the remnants, though, in case it might come in handy later in the year - and it did!
I'd been wanting to make a work which draws a comparison between a honeycomb pattern (yellow, geometric, speaks to contemporary discussion about bees - decline in bee population, possible causes eg. pesticides and destruction of natural habitats) and a corn cob (also yellow, geometric, small kernels - the exact same size as a beehive hexagon, speaks to consumerism, modern farming, GMOs, pesticides, etc...) - the two patterns are an aesthetic + conceptual match made in heaven.
The smoky texture also speaks to things like smoking beehives to calm the bees; fire - a sense of danger; the fact that it's just a segment of the cob makes it looks like a bite has been taken out of it, a possible analogy for 'consuming' or destroying the land via monocrops...

If I could do it again it would be printed in black, not yellow.

Documentation: boxes, continued

I wanted to document the variety of images on the produce boxes, but photographs weren't getting the  image quality I was after. So I dragged all the boxes up to the computer lab and scanned them (in 2-4 parts for the larger boxes...)

then photoshopping them back together, and tidying up the backgrounds etc.
Some of the results:

Jakub Geltner

Really enjoying looking through the portfolio of Czech artist Jakub Geltner:

Cultural landscape:

Nests:

Groups of satellite dishes and security cameras have invaded parts of Europe, clustering like seagulls around beach rocks and growing like barnacles on the sides of buildings.
These aren’t installations by any government, but rather works by Prague-based artist Jakub Geltner—part of a series called “Nest.” Geltner started the project in 2011, using strategic groupings of man-made technology to explore how humans and their machines have “infested” all kinds of spaces. (source)

“The urban landscape is our modern nature,” Geltner says, in that there’s always a rivalry between planned and random growth. Buildings, for example, are like trees that have been purposefully placed in a specific area. In nature, trees are spontaneously adorned with birds’ nests or lush moss. Random growth on buildings, however, comes from humans who crowd the exteriors with all sorts of appliances for surveillance, entertainment, and communication.Geltner’s work speaks to just how much technology has bled into the urban (and natural) landscape. His sculptures are beautiful, confusing, and discomfiting— exactly the kind of tension he wants his audience to consider. (source)

Documentation, week 22: plastic bag prints (from week 18)

As Judy recommended in my mid year report I have been experimenting with printing on different surfaces. Starting with plastic bags - the original idea that led to these works.
This was about 5 weeks ago, but I have had a lot of momentum in my project since (with the food show, etc) and haven't had time to get around to posting these images until now.

an attempt at the orange-yellow colour of biosecurity-scanned organic materials

corn and soy - 2 of the most commonly GM-ed crops (others include cotton, wheat and rice)

a more red colour, red=danger...

fluro yellow-green, radioactivity...

testing ink mixes to replicate the colours on the 'new world' bags

on the reverse of the floor bag; can you see the beans printed over the 'new world' logo? I thought the 4 green stripes (cut off by the red 'NW' band) looked like soy beans...

red corn over 'new world' - interested in the dystopia/utopia connotations of the name, 'new world'...

the previous images were printed with the bag stretched out on the textile printing table - the above image was not 'stuck' to the surface so there were some printerly, textural imperfections...

this looked interesting from the other side, faintly showing through behind the text

printing the corn over the other 'new world' label - not really visible

different 'weights' of ink

using the stencil from the grocery bags

conceptual relevance: '100% degradable bag'
(technically all plastic bags are degradable... it just takes thousands of years)

I think George was right in saying that the image is invisible. It's not at all clear enough that these are fruits and vegetables, they get lost in the colour/complexity.

grapes printed on a bottle bag

Conveyor belt art

I recently obtained a 3m long conveyor belt.

My uncle Trevor, of V3 - an exhibition equipment company - custom-made it for a client, for a one-off event, and apparently no one has any further need for it...

So, while thinking about what to do with it, I've been looking up other artists who have worked with conveyors...

Artist unknown

Emily Jacir, 2011. 'A closed-circuit conveyor belt going endlessly in circles.'

Aaron Flint Jamison, 'conveyor', 2013

Gabriel Lester
Flat as the World is Round, 2010
85 x 40 x 150 cm
Flat conveyor, simplified exemplar, motor, lamps

Flat as the World is Round (2010) is a metaphorical play with moving scenery in which the very prosaic construction of a conveyor belt at a supermarket checkout is transformed into the magical world of a shadow show. A continuous cycle shows us the different milieus we encounter in our everyday lives. This work subtly combines the medieval concept of a flat earth, which is now recognised as absurd, with elements of Plato’s cave allegory. It uses ironical and, above all, poetic means to present a world of shadows and illusions to an observer fascinated by the silhouettes on the wall.

Christine Wong Yap, Pounds of Happiness (conveyor belt), 2009, paper, neon gel pens, glitter pens, wood, motor, table, 48 x 34 x 24 inches / 122 x 86 x 61 cm

A kinetic sculpture that displays a looped drawing of pound store products drawn with pound store materials.