Installation

The show opened yesterday.  Sadly I forgot to take my camera with me in the rush to get out the door so I have no photos to share yet. I can, however, share a couple from the installation process.  I went to the gallery on Thursday, after the majority of the show was already up, and began installing the “pile”, then went back on Friday afternoon to install all of the frames throughout the gallery and touch up the pile.  I don’t have any photos yet of the completed piece, or of the framed elements hanging throughout the gallery, so those will have to come later.

When I walked in with my boxes of tiles, here's what the show looked like.

And here's what my piece looked like after the first day of installing

Initially, I was just stacking them randomly because I had no idea what I wanted to do, or what form they should take.

A few unexpectedly did this wonderful layering with the broken edges where you could see some sort of form emerging

To me, it hinted at some sort of decay or ruin to the perfectly arranged stacks, so I intentionally rearranged them to emphasize this

I had one box of blank tiles left, so I printed those later in the evening and brought the final pieces in the next day to complete the "pile"--I will post those photos as soon as I take some!

One of the coolest things about installing was the breakage factor.  Especially with the larger central tower, as I added more to the stack, tiles below would break as they succumbed to the weight of the tiles above them.  They made this amazing popping noise and would shake the whole stack whenever one broke.  I thought it was so cool, and something no one else would get to see once the stacks settled, so I caught a bit of it on video just so I had some sort of documentation of this phenomena.