Composed landscapes

Here I'm working mostly on the "above treeline" collage but sifting colors into piles for potential use in other pieces.

Collage work in progress… the usual paper mayhem ensues!

So I set to work. I had done very simple sketches of how the landing imagery would flow upward through the space. As you climbed the stairs, different views would present themselves. Beginning with level one, walking along a stream with broad views into the distance, level two at the edge of a forest, level three passing a waterfall, level four above treeline, and level five depicting the last few boulders at the peak with views of the sky and distant landforms.

Each collage would be composed of many pieces of paper ripped from magazines and repurposed to make new landscapes from my imagination. The studio quickly became filled with piles of sifted materials! These were more detailed and more realistic than any collages I've made in the past… they needed to be wildly interesting at nine times their original size so there was a constant concern about how they would translate once enlarged.

Union Station location

View of new transit center from building, looking northwest.

One really great aspect of the stairwell project is the location of the building, adjacent to Denver's Union Station transit redevelopment area. I'm both excited and nervous about this project! It's a bit of a leap… working small and thinking big!

Standpipes and other issues

Level two standpipe looks particularly awkward to work around.

The stairwell project was approved by the client and my first visit to the site was exciting, but also a little worrisome. On the stairwell plans, we'd identified a standpipe (for firefighting purposes) running vertically through the space... however it looked a lot more innocuous on paper than it did in real life! Here are some photos of the rough space under construction in mid-September. It was obvious that the artwork, once installed, needed to somehow overwhelm the standpipe rather than the other way around!

Hilary discovers a box inexplicably mounted to center of level one wall, later relocated!

The stairwell project

Over the summer I worked with art consultant Hilary DePolo on a proposal to use enlargements of my collages to enliven the interior stairwell of a new office building adjacent to Denver's Union Station.

The concept was to encourage people to use the stairs by creating a welcoming and visually stimulating environment. In addition, another artist would add a motion-activated sound installation to further animate the space.

I worked with the building plans to develop a scale for the original collages that I felt would translate when enlarged and applied to an entire landing wall. The image needed to be clear from a distance and interesting graphically as a viewer climbed closer. Because I am working with images culled from magazines, printed with a dot pattern, it was critical to make some samples of what the enlargement might be like.

We eventually settled on an enlargement of approximately 900%. The lowest level had a low floor-to-ceiling height, the top level had a tall floor-to-ceiling height, and the remaining three floors had the same proportions. The original collages were done on boards that reflected those proportions. Each original panel was one foot wide but the heights would vary to accommodate the floor-to-ceiling height differences.