Palos Verdes Art Center Building Wrap
Here’s how this project came to be, from conception to presentation. If you’re in the greater Los Angeles area through December 2, 2020, I hope you’ll have a chance to see the building, covered with my images.
A film by Eric Minh Swenson. (Film number one-thousand thirteen hundred and fourteen in the series.)
Palos Verdes Art Center, Rancho Palos Verdes, California. From September 2019 through 2020, the building wrap is on view. Exterior, so it’s always open! Drive on by, (here’s a map) then stop for a closer look…
In December of 2018, I found a call for entry with an enticing theme: to wrap the exterior of a building with artwork. It came with prize money, which is obviously excellent, but more exciting than that was the concept that I could see my work printed in a larger scale than I’d ever imagined, and I could work with the different planes presented by the various walls of the building’s odd and dated architecture. For my entry, I made some variations of what I’d like to see, photo-shopped them on images of the building, crossed my fingers and promptly forgot about it. I’ve learned that after spending a chunk of time on an entry like this, I can get so invested in the outcome that it’s actually useful to forget when the results will be announced—it allows me to get on with other things.
This is what I had to work with, a marked up cell phone picture of the building sides, and a sense that making this building beautiful might be rather necessary right now…
Here is my entry to the competition. I didn’t really understand the whole pillar/entry way situation, and how the parts of the building projected, so this seemed like a crazy sort of beautiful beginning. What seemed crucial to me was this transplanting of Oregon flowers into the arid Los Angeles landscape.
The east wall seemed like it was two walls pushed together from their photo, so I took this busy scene and put it out front and center, covering all of it. Amazingly, because of my technique in creating the images at super high resolution, I was pretty confident that it would print well, and not look all pixilated. But I didn’t really know.
Because I’m a fanatic for being thorough, I made another version to submit based on that thought that the LA landscape might accompany these less colorful photographs, made from the high desert of eastern Oregon when I was on a residency at PLAYA in 2018.
If they were enticed by the more arid scene, this was the option for the east wall. A bee on the dried dandelion top center would be rendered at about a foot tall. And yes, you could even make out the little hairs on his head, and his insane complex eyes. I really wanted to see that.
This would be over a foot tall on the wall. One tiny detail on a print that large. This is why I was so excited about my entry, and hoped that the images submitted pleased the judges as well.
Then in February, I got the call that I had won. All righty then. I started downloading more pdfs with measurements, tried to make sense of the layouts, asked a million questions, and worked hard to create image files for the printer. The scale started to freak me out. I’m used to inviting people to examine my work up close, say, on a 6 foot tall print to be impressed with the clarity and sharpness of image. Even though I thought it might hold up, it didn’t quite seem possible. I was told to think of it as having a viewing distance of 15 feet, at least. That seemed so contrary to what I usually go for. But. The files were massive, and constantly on the verge of crashing my computer. I really didn’t want to shrink them. Fred and I flew down to check it out, to resolve my questions, and to meet the team at Palos Verdes Art Center. In April, the art center looked like this:
The Palos Verdes Art Center’s first building wrap was by Hollywood photographer Douglas Kirkland installed in March of 2019. My artwork would cover his in six months time. This was my first view of the art center: who hasn’t seen that iconic image of Marilyn Monroe?!!! Click on any image below to enlarge.
The most comforting thing about seeing the building wrap in place was realizing that these first images had mostly been taken from 35mm film, or maybe up to 4x5. But my work was coming from 8.5” x 11.7” high resolution scans, and it became clear that print resolution was not going to be any big deal at all.
The other lovely and generous thing the Palos Verdes Art Center did was to plant the idea of an artist residency in my head, via the invitation to stay at the guest home of the PVAC director. Overlooking the bluffs on the peninsula, the place was historic, wacky, and gorgeous.
Coming home with new hard data, measurements and concepts of how the wrap would need to work, I set to work.
I worked with the images as if they were merely 2D, and I gave myself brain aches trying to understand what the heck what happening in the entry way, the relationship of the pillars to the portico, and how the light fixture worked. Fred, dear Fred, said, “I’ll go build you a model.” So he did, and I finally understood what I needed to do.
The selfie walls….did you take one on your visit? Please send it to me and I’ll post it here! Thanks, with love, Deb
I’m proud of receiving grant funding from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation allowed for travel and documentation of this project. The state of Oregon has a fantastic support system for the arts, and as a self-employed artist for over thirty years, I can tell you that it helps. Even when I apply and don’t get the grant, I never know who on the committee might be introduced to my work for the first time, or reminded of it for the second time, or consider it for another project a third time…
The PVAC building wrap will be up through 2020.