As I mentioned last time, I recently unveiled a new work — an abstract mosaic titled “Castle Dream”. It’s now on view at Pegasus Gallery, 312 SW Madison Ave., Corvallis, OR.

But what does the work mean? Why did I make it, and how?

“Castle Dream” was inspired by the distorted reflections of a tall building in another building’s windows. The distortions reminded me of the futility of trying to recall details of a dream the following morning; the more detail one tries to recall, the less clear any of the dream becomes. Like a dream, the reflections provide no clear information about the building and are quite difficult to describe to someone else.

The reflections were in the whole abstract, but I knew I wanted to take them further into abstraction. I conceived of the idea of isolating some of the more interesting window panes, and reconstructing them into a facsimile of a building that would only hint at the original construction.

The work started by painstakingly re-photographing tiny sections of the 35mm transparency I made at the scene, then enlarging each into individual prints. Those individual prints where then mounted and secured into an aluminum structure that was meant to evoke how a modern skyscraper is constructed.

Each “pane” in the work is a different view of the entire reflection, and therefore each is unique. But it is in the mosaic that the suggestion of a building appears, even as the images themselves look less and less like a building as one gets closer to the piece.

The scale of the work — 31” x 82” — was dictated by that facet of the abstraction. In most photographic abstractions, the image as a whole (as if viewed from across the room) doesn’t appear to be familiar. That’s one of the aims of abstraction, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar. In such pictures the work becomes more familiar the closer you get, as you start to see the constituents of the whole image. You personally  may not know exactly what the subject(s) was, but you can see that it would be recognizable to someone.

I wanted to do the opposite: to make a work that at a distance looks like something that seems like it might be familiar, but as you move closer to verify your “hunch” it becomes less and less recognizable until  you come right up to the work — when it seems to dissolve into nothing more than colorful shards, with barely any structure at all. 

In order to get that effect, each image needed to be of sufficient size as to enhance the grain from the original transparency. After much experimentation, I determined the size of prints I needed, and the result is the smallest they (and the work as a whole) could be and still deliver the effect I wanted. 

As you move closer to the work, then, what you think you saw seems to disappear, like our dreams in the light of day. That’s why it’s called “Castle Dream”!

-=[ Grant ]=-