c h r o m a - in baltimore

July 30, 2015

c h r o m a - in baltimore

oh hello !

it's time to show you a million pictures of the chroma installation. i had grand plans to show you things while we were getting it up, but yeah. that didn't happen. a friend joked that he thinks i should get a trophy/award for most brutal/intense installations. OK yeah. well... at least this time i had a partner in crime in christine buckton tillman.

so it's UP ! for a couple more weeks [through August 19th] at gallery CA

we used cyndi's submission in the title area as an "intro" to the show

so yes. weeks and weeks. months and months of collecting these loving little mini collections paid off.

when we started we knew that we had to keep the "transitions" between colors fluid. i had a LOT of practice from photographing all the stuff as it came in and christine and i agreed that it was the white space and the the way you moved from one color to the next that was going to be crucial to the big piece working. that the edges should be "organic" not a perfect shape.

prior to flying out i sent out EVERYTHING pre sorted by color to christine....

when we got there the first thing we did was dump the bags in front of the wall. we quickly realized that we needed to lay everything out. we were going to have help, but we couldn't leave it to people to randomly place things. we knew, too, that if we laid it out in front of the wall we could control the spacing. how high it went on the wall. how it filled the space.

this was both tedious/tiring, and exhilarating...

as we got further along i think we realized that indeed it was going to work. and it was going to work well [huzzah].

oh and there were opportunities to see where what you wore fit into the spectrum.

this might be my favorite process shot [christine took it - her work is on the walls - LOVE IT].

we ended up taking and printing photos of each section and using them as guides to place things on the wall [if you are curious we used mostly HOT glue ... yes. hot glue. and pins, and poster putty].

the photos were a guide, but we didn't expect the wall to end up 100% accurate.

slowly but surely things moved from the floor to the wall. [it was kind of like magic]

me on scaffolding at the end of a 12 hour day.

we had helpers of all ages and sizes and places. it felt like camp. [it always feels like camp].

and then finally the last pieces were put into place.

this is the stuff we overlook [a lot] on a daily basis. we are surrounded by color. it is a constant in our lives. this is the stuff we call "junk", what our kids play with, what we toss into a drawer, what we discard...

all together it becomes something else. [those are my kid's ballet slippers]. why are there so many more blue things?

my kid looked color by color to tell me what she would want to keep in each area [mama there isn't a lot of silver. why did the sliver and gold end up by itself on the little wall.... excellent question. it just wouldn't fit on the big wall. and we thought neutrals/metallics would look good on their own].

looking in through the door.

THE WHOLE THING !! all the things. we used almost everything that was sent to us. a few things had to get edited out because we didn't have the space. we mostly removed redundant things [for example i think we had 50 of one color green button. about 25 made it in].

this is us. high-fiving because well... because it deserved a high-five. so do all the people that helped. and every last person who sent something in. [once again it takes a small army]. i keep thinking about how amazing it is to pull together all these people, things, ideas in one space.

if you want to read more about our process or the piece then check out this great interview that amy boone-mccreesh published on the b-more art blog [btw that is MY FAMILY in the header photo. hi mom, hi dad].