I’m working on three shows that are about to open, Benicia Gantner & Kim Shoenstadt and Printmaker in Residence: Dirk Hagner at Angels Gate, and Edith Abeyta’s solo show at the El Camino College Art Gallery, Salty: Three Tales of Sorrow. I spent most of this weekend in the studio with Edith and Michele, preparing materials for the installation at El Camino, which is going to be all installation, complex and very, very labor intensive. Here are some shots from this weekend’s prep. Most of today’s work revolved around an “under wraps” component, so we’ll have to wait a few weeks until the opening of the show for me to post those, but they’re gonna be great, so keep an eye out.
Above – Edith tears fabric – for all of these photos, just repeat what’s happening a few hundred times, to get a feel for Edith’s process and methods.
Above – A staggering list of artists contributed drawn on hankies for the show. Each of the artists was given a kit containing a hankie and a commemorative ball point pens, in a tidy little box. Michele was attaching tabs to each hankie so that they could be hung for the show.
Above – many, many pinned together strips of torn fabric.
Above – stacks of torn fabric squares, with Michele stacking and smoothing them out.
Above – my major weekend task. One of the installations in the show is a recreation/revision of the installation that Edith did for the show Lim(b)it at Walled City in 2003. The original installation was suspended from an overhead network of seven miles of string, anchored to hundreds of eye hooks embedded in three of the gallery walls. Having no fourth wall, the grid sort of cantilevers the installation over the space.
We’re recreating the overhead string grid for this show, and I’m anchoring the eyehooks to a series of thin wood beams that will then be attached to the walls, allowing us to maintain both the geometry and integrity of the grid in a way that’s more structurally sound than the methods we used in 2003, especially when accounting for “no screw” dead zones in the ECC gallery walls caused by the presence of air bladders that function as part of the Unistrut system of moveable walls in use there. Theoretically everything should go both faster and we will be able to sleep at night, knowing that the eye hooks are much more secure than they were last time.
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