Hanging

It has been a week since I have written anything, but my my its been a crazy week.  I have been very busy getting everything ready for the dry run show as well as finishing up my thesis paper (which I officially just submitted...one thing off my back).  I drop off my artwork this friday so I have been trying to get everything done today so that thursday I can more so just organize everything.  

The main thing I have been working on is figuring out the display for the polyurethane squares.  I knew I wanted labels on them to make them appear like specimen.  Other than that I was thinking of either putting them in shadow boxes with pins or on a small shelf with a light behind it.  In reading the label of the polyurethane can I learned that it can be flammable in certain situations.  So, I need to figure that out before I put a light behind them. 

Therefore, I turned to pinning the labels and squares to a shadow box and hanging it to the wall.

Here is a close up of the images and the labels.

I now had to decide how many frames to do.  Ultimately I chose 12 frames that are each around 

13" x 13" with 12" of visible space.  I was able to fit 16 squares in each frame.  So, I needed 192 squares.  Surprisingly I was pretty close to that.  I only needed about 25 more to meet that amount. 

Here is a picture of 9 completed frames in their respective spot.  I plan to complete the last three on Thursday once the last set of squares finish drying completely.  

Here is another close up.

I am very excited about how these have turned out.  And whether I use these for the final or not I am really excited about these and the idea behind them.

I will talk to you soon as I will have pictures from the dry run show once it is installed.

Rachel 

 

Hanging

Its official, all of my books are on the wall!!!!!!!!!!!!  And the scary part...the dry run, or the practice run, for the final show in June...is in 2 weeks.  SCARY!!!!

I hung all of my books on Saturday.  I did have a few issues getting the sheets off the ground as i had accidentally glued some of them together.  But, I was able to figure it out.  There were a couple books that I either forgot to glue or weren't glued enough.  So, I had to address those.  The hanging process was a little tricky and frustrating, but I think that's because I did it on my own.  I am glad that I got to see what it was like now though so I am prepared.  

I left the books to hang over the weekend and if anything falls I can see it and address it now.  I am keeping my fingers crossed that everything is okay when I go in tomorrow.  Here is a picture of the books.  I couldn't get the whole thing in the picture, so it is cut at the bottom.  In total it is 8' x 8'.  It may be a little more than 8' long since the books hang over the edges.   

It's crazy.  This picture makes the books look small.  Even though you can see one corner of the room and the other is right beyond the edge of the picture, it just looks small.  I am hoping that it doesn't seem this way tomorrow.  

I have also been writing my thesis today.  And it had dawned on me that people do hang on to their memories, which make who they are.  But, I think I hang on to my memories, specifically of my grandmother, more so than others.  It is my baggage or my storage.  Then, I started to question why I hold on to these memories more so than others.  After much thought I realized its because I don't want to forget my grandmother.  I am extremely afraid that if I stop holding on tightly to each and every memory that the impact of her and the essence of her will just slip away.  So, I just keep piling the memories on, that way if I need to remember something specific I can pull it from my storage without struggle.  I am looking into incorporating this idea much more into my work.  It probably will not be evident in the dry run, but in the final it will.  

Rachel

Gluing

Hello all!

It has been a couple days since I talked with you last.  And the theme this week is glue...wood glue to be specific.  I have been gluing all of my books to the wood sheets that I showed you last time.  I have a very small studio so I couldn't glue all of them at the same time.  I started off with about 6 sheets of wood on Tuesday and then on Wednesday I had to use two of the sheets that were already glued to start gluing the next.  All of the sheets of books fit together like a puzzle.  It is actually a very cool and a fun process.  Yesterday I glued the last six.  The funny thing with this process is that by the end of the day of gluing I have hardly any room to walk.  Yesterday was actually the worst one.  I had to actually put a board down over some of the books and step on that to get from one side to the other.  But, fortunately, I have glued everything and tomorrow I plan to go to my studio to hang everything on the wall so that I can make sure it stays up over the weekend.  Here are some pictures of my crazy studio... 

These are the books that have been glued on Tuesday.

 Here are the drying books on Wednesday. 

 I used the paint cans to make sure that they have weight on them

Another view of the lack of room in my studio

This is a picture from yesterday.  I screwed up the sheets that were dried.

Here is another picture of the books that I glued yesterday

 And another one with stuff in my studio on the books to add weight to them. 

I am very anxious to see the finished product.  I do have some extra books left.  If need be I can always add those to the wall.  I will get back with you tomorrow to show you the finished piece. 

Rachel

Prepping

It's been a very short time since I talked to you last, but I wanted to let you know what I have been up to today.  As you know I am gluing all of my books to sheets of wood to make a grid like system underneath.  That means I need a lot of wood and as I was about to get wood from Lowe's my professor told me about (11) 4' x 4'  sheets of wood that were left behind by past students with their paintings on them.  So....I snagged all of them.  My boyfriend so graciously cut all of them into 2' x 2' squares on Sunday so that I could prep them for the books today.  All in all there are 44 squares available for me to use.  Here is a picture of all of them cut and stacked

I started off by painting over each of them in white to cover up the side that had a painting on it.  This side will be going against the wall.  I painted 10 out of the 44 today so that I can glue the books on tomorrow.  Here is a picture of all of them drying.

Then, after these dried I painted a grey acrylic wash onto the other side.  I didn't want to do a thick layer of paint since I need the wood glue to adhere to the wood grain.  So, I did a very thin and light layer of grey so the grain was still visible, but the color of the wood was muted out a little bit.  Here are the drying ones. 

So, tomorrow I can start gluing the books down.  It should be fun!!!

I have also been doing more tape transfers.  Here are all of the ones I have done on my wall

And here are a few close ups

I think they have all turned out really cool.  I decided I want to do a large one about 4' x 4'.  I picked out a picture I wanted to do and made sure it was blurred enough.  Then, I went into photoshop and set up a grid so that each section was 8" x 8".  I printed out each section on a separate piece of paper and labeled them with a code based on the grid.  So, now I can do the tape transfer and when it is finished I will still know where each piece of tape goes.  All of the prior tape transfers have been going onto paper, but I think I want to put this one onto wood or something sturdy.  I just have to decide specifically what I want the treatment to be on the surface.  I am super pumped to get going on these things tomorrow!

Rachel

Planning

I'm back again!!!!!!!  Through this past week I have been trying to figure out how my wall of books is going to pan out and what other elements I am going to add to it.  I had been contemplating doing the lights with the blurred images for awhile.  I do like them very much, but I don't know that I like them as a whole for this specific piece.  So, I have been exploring other options and I want to share with you some of these ideas today.  

Last year when this idea for the books first came about, I had started doing the overlaying portraits that I showed you in my first blog entry.  I then thought it might be interesting to do one of these portraits on top of the book wall.  Yet, the idea changed over the summer and I wasn't into it anymore.  However, I have been discussing with my professor my dilemma with these books and he again suggested the portrait overlays.  So, I decided that I should start doing these portraits again on paper and maybe next quarter I can do one on a a section of books. 

Here are two of the overlays I have done.  The first is a small 12" x 12" and the second is 18" x 24".

I like the second one a lot better (the first one looks a little funny) and I do think it would be cool to have the portrait on top of the books.  I think that I just want that to be a side thing.  So, that is what I will have to do.  I may have to make more books for that.  But, my hope is that I will be able to do at least one by next quarter even if it is not extremely large.

The next thing I have been looking at is the idea of incorporating the polyurethane look in with the books.   If I could have all of the books look like they are being pushed back like the images in the polyurethane squares then I would be beyond happy.  The only issue is that polyurethane takes a really long time to dry and I need something that can be extra thick and not take months to dry.  So, I started investigating clear plastic resin.  I found a quart container at Michael's and I also got a catalyst, transparent dyes, goggles, gloves, and a mask.  It was a day long process to pour all the resin and sit the book inside of it.  I ended up using the entire container...which was $30.00....all to cover one book.  

The look turned out really cool, I am just nervous about the price. 

Here is a close up. 

  And here is a side view.

It looks really cool, but if that's all I get for $30.00 can you imagine what it would be like for all of the 100's of books I have...I don't have that much money.  And it can be pretty toxic...So using all of that makes me nervous health wise.  I have a critique this week and I plan to discuss with my senior thesis professors my dilemma and the ideas I have been thinking about.  Maybe they can give me some better ideas.

On to the last thing.  So, in discussing not knowing what to do to my wall of books my professor also suggested doing a painting over the books.  But, instead of it being extremely thick like the portraits, it would be very subtle through ink washes.  I would do a blurred image of my family or my grandmother or an image that has resonated with me while working on my senior thesis.  It would be so subtle that it may not be even visible at certain times.  To see what this looks like I printed off an image of what my book wall would look like then I printed off a blurred family picture onto a transparency and overlapped it.  This is the result.

Its extremely faint, but I like that about it.  But, with this image if you angle it at all there is a little more clarity with the image. 

I don't know if that will happen if I did ink washes over the books, but that would be very cool if it did.  

For the time being I plan on getting all of the books glued to wood so that I can have them all up on the wall and then I will go from there.  I will talk to you soon.

Rachel

Polyurethaning

Hello All!  It has been a week since I have written anything and my goodness a lot has happened.  We met with the Aaron who runs the galleries at UC.  He is a very intense man, but he is very good at what he does.  He went over our trial run of our DAAPWorks art show at the end of the school year.  This trial run is in....3 weeks...did your heart drop? Because mine did.  Every time I hear 3 weeks it just sinks in how little time that is.  Not to say that I don't think I can be ready by then...I definitely can.  But I still seem to panic about it.  But any who.  I have been working on several things and ideas, but this entry I am mainly going to focus on my polyurethane cubes that I have been making.

First, I want to let you know that I left my books glued onto a 2' by 2' sheet of wood hanging on my wall in my studio.  And after an entire week the books didn't budge one bit.  I am very excited about the process of gluing these books to the wood now.  Here is the sheet hanging in the critique room from Thursday.  Obviously it looks kind of the same, but it is nice to see it out of my crammed studio.

Okay, on to the polyurethane.  So, the ones I had drying last week turned out pretty good.  Here is a picture of all of the done ones together. 

So, overall there are 34.  Some I like more than others.  Here are some of the ones I like better.

So, I think they are really interesting.  I am super pumped about them.  I feel like they exude the idea of loss, and I thought it would be cool to display them on a light box with labels.  That way you could see the affect of the light without having to touch them.  The labels would hopefully give off an idea of inventory, storage, or scientific specimen.  

It usually takes about a week for the polyurethane to dry.  So, I decided to go to Lowe's to see if they had anything that would dry faster.  I found water based polyurethane that said it dried faster on the label.  It looked a hell of a lot different when I opened the can of it.  Here is a picture below of the water based filled in the molds.  I was super scared that it wouldn't dry the same as the other ones.  But, when a small bit dried on a piece of paper it seemed to be the same color.  So, I wasn't as concerned until they weren't drying as fast as I expected them to.  

Here is the first tray that I did at home that took over a week to dry.  As you can see that they look a little funny. They sunk in and they have holes in some of them.  They are supposed to be viewed from the back but the back is still gooey and you can't see the photos through the back. 

Here are some of the individual ones.  They aren't bad, they are still a little interesting, but they aren't the look that I'm going for.

The image can still be seen in some of them, but this is supposed to be the back.

These next two are particularly cool, especially the way the holes work with the photos.

Here is an example of a bad one since there is a hole straight through it and you cant even see the photo.

I flipped over all of them so the backs can dry.  Once this happens I am going to see how they look.  I may end up being happy with them.  I am going to go ahead and let the other tray in my studio dry.  But, I got some regular polyurethane today and more molds.  I plan on filling the two molds I just got and the one I just emptied with regular polyurethane today or tomorrow so that I have 72 squares drying at the same time.

I am planning on doing something with these for the trial show in 3 weeks.  So I need to get a move on since these dry so slow.  My professor suggested doing some photos that are a little more precise because I am doing blurred images and the polyurethane blurs them even more.  We will see how that looks.  I will talk to you soon with an update.

Rachel