Selected gallery from Five Minute of Doubt’s “Indefinite” by A.Salina. “Indefinite” is a script/short film produced by 5mod and released earlier this year.
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Straight from the horse's ass (part 2)
The concept took prescedence last week in part one, so I thought part two should contain some more technical details on the work but include some more insight as to how it is being made and why. The photos in the gallery (click to enlarge) are of the first piece in a series of five. They show the progression from the initial photograph to colour study and then full scale.
Speaking of scale, I found it essential to get as close as possible to a 1:1 (from the view at street level at least) to convey the uniformity that the chosen subjects have in the real world. Seeing as the concept is based on power, I found the decision to replicate and repeat entirely fitting.
The material is polythene, each of the five sheets measuring 2100x1500 mm. As painting on plastic is damn near impossible I had to experiment and produced a formula which I cannot disclose for obvious reasons.
When it came to the colour scheme (as you can also see in part one) the work relies heavily on the complimentary scale to represent duality. Contrasting colours such as blue and yellow speak of a number of different things, high on the list being political parties, moods or even personal preferences. However, the very nature of a clash, presented on two sides of the same object emphasises what people in power are inevitably conflicted by; that human nature often derails a principle.
The composition of each piece (as aforementioned) is based around the front and back of each monument. Due to the subsequent narrowness, each side makes an abstraction of the other (see part one for a better example) and the combinations sometimes give no real clarity on what you’re actually looking at. The blank areas on one side render the base layer of the other entirely visible and create an interesting dilemma on where to shift your vision.
In light of recent events in the UK; once the last part of this work is underway, the further political context of the work will be explored next week.
Predictable monumentalism
Recent indecision and the seemingly unending problems regarding Brexit has given me the impression that the EU's days are most certainly numbered. The "Monument to the European Union" is a political work that represents my prediction of the future; that the EU will no longer exist and, at some point, architects will be invited to immortalize what it stood for. I have taken my cues from seeing other proposals for Public works in their documentative form. Photographs, sketches, written explanations etc. The successful proposals exist somewhere in the real world and have become part of the urban population's everyday experience. The failures on the other hand, rejected for whatever reason, give off the feeling of what could been, the possible alternative or if 'the grass is greener'. I have found this notion to be systematic of how many feel about Brexit and especially the contemporary opinion on the subject of nationalism.
The sculpture itself is a collection of twenty five plaster casts. Each being a representation of a motorway junction in and around Bruxelles. These stand for the very literal confusion and the list of potential outcomes that we now find ourselves in. In addition, by experimenting with the scale and digitally rendering a model into a realistic image, the question of how 'monumental' or 'substantial' it is comes to the fore.