Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Big Art at Berlin Mall


I've been straight out these last few months, working on a very cool project called Big Art at the Berlin Mall in Berlin, Vermont. The mall is owned by Heidenberg Properties, which wanted to do a creative project as an introduction to their intention to make creative changes at the mall. I was asked to propose an art installation, and came up with the idea of mounting huge blowups of work by 16 Vermont artists in the windows that face the parking lot. I discovered that there's a type of vinyl that these images could be printed on that is visible from both the outside AND the inside of the mall, and that was the ticket!

It took a long time to research and choose work of the right dimensions that I could arrange in what I call "conversational groupings" in each of the areas of the building's facade.

The installation of the vinyl on the windows was completed today, and I am now relieved that it all turned out fabulously. Here's what the Main Entrance looks like, with Jayne Shoup's Waterfall on the left and David Smith's Poplars on the right. I wanted to have two pieces with a diagonal structure, in which the diagonals stretch down toward the entrance, moving viewers from the outside (and the exterior landscape of trees and water) into the interior of the building. You can see how impressive the scale is, with the front doors and the guy walking toward them. The images are HUGE (as Bernie Sanders said)!


And here's what it looks like at the other entrance at the end of the mall, with (L-R) Steven P. Goodman's Beach Study, Arthur Schaller's Blue Ship and White Object, Maggie Neale's Red, Rosalind Daniels' Spring Rain, Mark Lorah's Gate, Kathy Stark's Nano's Melons, and Elizabeth Nelson's Grass.


As I said, you can see the images both inside and outside. Here's Wendy James' Underpass from the outside


and the inside (where, of course, things are reversed -- in this case turning the car into a (British? Australian?) vehicle with the steering wheel on the other side! You can see that there are some fake mullions that are seen from the inside that create a grid.


These are ten of the 16 images. I'll post more later.