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.

FINAL INSTALL - 'MASS PRODUCE'

This work was such a huge investment; it addresses so many ideas, and brings up such a variety of different readings from everyone I discuss it with. I'm going to try to list them here.

-Supermarkets
-Packing houses - where fruit/veg gets sorted as they move across conveyor belts
-Biosecurity, and irradiation of imported produce; processes of pest control and systems of protecting our ecosystem
-Airports and luggage screening, 'declare or dispose'
-GMO - science, investigation/intervention into nature
-X rays - RISK that cannot be seen, dangers, implied 'brokenness'
-Treadmills - a lot of people think that these are treadmills when they first encounter it. Fair enough - they do look extremely similar. I think treadmills symbolise a gruelling contemporary obsession with, and pursuit of, a glorified idea of 'health'.
-Judith Darragh calls these works 'Contemporary Still Lifes'; a tribute to traditional still life paintings (particularly Flemish) which conventionally depict fresh produce and often subtly indicated social class. The conveyors also have their own inbuilt 'gold frames!'
-I find it amusing that these could be called 'moving image' works - a static image, but on an animated moving surface
-Surveillance technology (sensors, detecting movement)
-Screen print - the significance of the 'screen'; 'screening' can refer to security
-The sensors have not been altered in any way for the installation, the element of their interactiveness is a happy coincidence. They are designed to respond to the items on the supermarket counter as they move along, so that they stop at the edge by the cashier with the scanner. To have the walking viewer activate and determine this movement literally puts them, unawares, into the position of an item from the supermarket. A passive commodity, defined by their financial value, passing between the hands of larger forces...
-The black background relates to film reels - of both radiographic images, negatives of film photography, and traditional motion picture reels; all processes which are now mostly digital. In many ways the experience of shopping too is becoming digital...
-The direction of the movement is a significant and deliberate decision. The images are not moving upwards - which would imply growing up from the ground like a plant, or reference scrolling film credits. Rather, this conventional direction is turned upside down, and they are moving downwards - which gives the impression of coming towards, rather than away from, the viewer. This implies the ease with which food arrives via the supermarket, almost 'falling from the sky', implying a sense of ignorance / naivety about where our food comes from, and possibly also the mysterious corporations at the top of the food chain - 'above' us and out of sight.
-The direction of the movement also becomes a reference to slot machines, gambling - some winning it all, while almost everyone else loses it all. Gambling with our future, and the GMO crops on which we are placing our bets. Select images can be lined up in a row, bringing in all the winning money...
-Corn and soy - dominating the world's farmed crops. Despite the diversity of the thousands of edible plant species on this planet, a huge majority of plants grown for consumption come from these two crops,  alongside rice and wheat. This idea of uneven distribution speaks also about social issues, wealth and inequality - hunger and poverty exist in the same world as excess food waste and an obesity epidemic.
-Smartphones - rectangular, black technology (a sort of monolithic version); the movement imitates the gesture of 'scrolling,' while the images reinforce this, relating to the huge current trend / subculture of images of healthy food posted and shared on social media
-Food/plants 'made human' - via their scale, being 'portrait', and vertical upright, eye level, the connection to body parts via radiography, the inescapable Arcimboldo reference
-Hanging tapestries (e.g. Pierre Bonnard's 'Femmes au jardin' panels in D'orsay is one of my favourite artworks - four long panels displayed together) and other quadtych artworks that reference the seasons, such as Arcimboldo's portraits - this idea of four divisions also makes me think of four suites of playing cards (more gambling connotations)
-They relate back to a hands-on scrolling canvas that I made last year. The feedback I received at the time was that it was my most successful work of the semester, and my tutor and examiner were disappointed that I didn't make more of these and develop the idea further - until now!
-Word play of 'conveyor' - the work interrogates art's ability to convey messages/ideas
-Seasonality, and the rotation of seasons...

FINAL INSTALL WIP

Welding WIP

Getting ready for the final install...

Below image: the final frames (top) new and improved, painted with primer and studio paint, which blends them in with the wall behind. Not unnoticeably, but discreetly.

It would be nice to have the conveyors mounted to the wall with no frame/bracket in sight, but this is extraordinarily tricky for health and safety reasons. 200+ kilograms of heavy metal equipment protruding from a drywall? Not a good plan. The force of gravity would have a thing or two to say about that. (As Pete says, 'physics is nature's way of inconveniencing lazy artists...') But hooking it over and securing it to the top = far more safe, tried and tested.

The original harness-style design (bottom) - stroke of luck that my steel got stolen and I had the chance and the time to re-think the design. 

Accidentally welded the first two the wrong way around (right 2) - lucky again that I bought more steel than I needed the second time round!

Documentation: A catch up post / series of unfortunate events (October)

It's been a while since I posted any documentation. This is not because I haven't been doing work - quite the opposite. I've been working so much I haven't had time to document anything properly.

It has been an absolute nightmare few weeks. Bear with me here. There is a happy ending, I promise.

However, the number of times I have gone home in tears is actually embarrassing. So is the number of days when I spent more than 12 hours working solidly at elam.
Now that all the stress is behind me, though, I think it was worth it...

As mentioned in my last post (which seems nightmarish enough, but it just gets worse from there, so much worse…) when I removed the roller bar, the rubber belt got slack and rubbed against the bolts at the back.

The back of the conveyor, roller bar visible

I figured I'd just sort this issue out later, and just get started straightaway, as I anticipated it was going to take ages so I was in a hurry to get printing. And then, when I took off the vinyl test layer, to my horror, it left residue all over the rubber, and I spent a full day scrubbing it off.

Then I began printing directly onto the rubber itself. It worked okay, would still scratch off when rubbed with a fingernail, so I did a few test patches with different gac / gel mediums mixed with the ink to improve adhesion. It seemed to work better with just the ink, and no additives.

To protect the prints from getting damaged during transit / handling / operation, I wanted to glaze them with some sort of clear plastic coat. I did a few test patches on the blank rubber and the one that worked best was a mixture of Gac 200 and some self levelling clear gel.

However, when I painted this over the prints, they dissolved. I had to scrub off the prints on the first conveyor belt and start over. Again.
So very depressing.

The next week, Ellen and I sussed out a way to seal the prints without this disintegration happening: using spray varnish and waiting for it to dry before applying the medium mixture. This became a very time consuming process as the varnish needed 24 hours to dry, and I could print the conveyors only 1/3rd at a time, with prepping and printing the screens took at least a day, plus drying time of the prints and the medium, so it took over a week to do the first two… It felt worth it, as I was so happy with the depth created by the wonderful sturdy layer of plastic-y varnish.

(The bits of masking tape at the bottom are markers)

Until it leaned against a chair leg overnight and stuck, ripping up a chunk of the medium as well as the print underneath. And then, horror of horrors, the same thing happened with some glad wrap that had been on the ground and got stuck to it, ripping off a whole section of the glaze/print as I carefully peeled it off. And then, once a finished/glazed conveyor had had a full week to dry, I put the roller bar back in, left it overnight, and realised that this was never going to work.
How silly to think I could apply a layer that was both a) adhesive enough to stick to the rubber, and b) not adhesive enough to stick to anything else. Um. Can't really have both.

a distinct indented line was left wherever the roller stopped...

 

Even without the roller, the belt would make contact with the bolts on the other side, which would cause same problem elsewhere.

Basically, I was not even back to square one, I was ten steps behind where I started.
Getting the varnish off all the prints so far took many days of hard labour, several metres of brillo pads, some paint stripper and a bottle of turps. Nothing could be more demoralising than having to put in this much effort to scrub off your art just to start over again. My blood, sweat and tears went into this artwork. Literally.

removal in progress - bottom left corner.

So, two weeks of intensely hard work wasted; physically and emotionally exhausted; and after having massacred my brain cells from the fumes (I wore a proper respirator mask while using paint stripper, but I'm still paranoid about those toxic fumes) - I started again.

Pete, the metal workshop technician, said I should cover up the roller with soft tape, but I decided to remove the roller altogether, and print onto the rubber using no other media. This was a reluctant defeat. I'd liked the conceptual connections, with the spray varnish linking to the 'dip spray' treatment of imported produce, the gel coat relating to petroleum based wax some fruits are coated with in order to 'maintain freshness' etc. Instead, the list of materials would now read, simply, 'ink on conveyor.''
This way doesn't have quite the same depth but is much more simple, and means it will be easy to re-do any prints should they get damaged in transit from one building to another, etc - rather than having to strip the glaze off and patch it up again, which I’d realised would never work. Sure, without the roller the edges will rub against the bolts at the back, but without the glaze, this damage won’t be evident, as long as the prints themselves are well clear of the edges.

So I got printing... Again.

more masking tape markers

And third time's the charm.

Each conveyor contains about 13 prints, over around 7 screens. Many of the prints needed to be cleaned off straightaway and done two or three times because of blemishes or streaks.
Each screen takes at least a couple of hours prep time - and things occasionally go wrong while water blasting, right at the end, and the process needs to start over.
Considering these hours that went into prepping the screens, it felt like a waste to clean them off again straight away. So I tripled my workload by doing some prints on paper  - white on black, and coloured on white - before cleaning the screens for the next rotation of prints.

Prints on paper

All up it was an extraordinarily long process, but it became enjoyable when it was working (finally!) and I was in the swing of it. I finally finished last Friday and didn't know what to do with myself!!! Full images of the paper prints (above) are to come. I'm still keen to do some different colour combinations, although this would require re-doing the screens all over again.

Of course, with our essay drafts due a while ago, I've been working on my essay at the same time as all of the above. The silver lining of the whole horrendous process I've just described is that it inspired me to come up with the analogy between screen printing and agriculture. Now I know full well how a farmer would feel over a failed crop, and why they would turn to resorts like pesticides, chemical fertilisers etc. if the situation called for it. I would usually never use toxic chemicals like turps and paint stripper, but desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures!

And I have also been busy in the metal workshop, making...
-legs for the white conveyor belt;
-new brackets for the black ones, which I redesigned after my visiting artist crit because I thought other method was kind of clunky (and, to continue my streak of bad luck, I had to go back to the steel shop because someone stole the metal i’d bought a few weeks earlier!!)
-brackets for the sensors

hard at work

And now that the black ones are done, I've been thinking hard about what to print on the white conveyor belt. Screen printing won't be possible on these due to the textured surface and the roller bars underneath which are not removable, but the vinyl stickers I have printed seem to work fine. But do I really want to print more fruit, or found fruit/veg boxes, onto this? I've got a few other ideas... the only issue now is TIME. And not enough of it. One month to go!!

Tests for scrolling images

These are the original ideas for what to print on the conveyor belts, presented in an animated mock-up:

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.