Champion Studio	Geoff Mcfetridge	Contact

2008

In The Mind

Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park Pavilion, Seattle

This is the largest scale installation I have done to date. It involved transforming the Pavilion designed by Manfredi and Weiss that overlooks the Seattle Art Museums' Sculpture Park in downtown Seattle. The primary wall that the installation occupies is 30 feet tall and 65 feet long. Most of the piece is made out of bent plywood. The bike-horn is made out of a combination of plywood tubes and carved mdf. The pins are vacuum formed plastic. Everything is painted in matte cel animation paint. None of the graphics are printed or digitally output, all are done by hand. On a far wall as you enter the space a long wall is covered in the hand silkscreened wallpaper "All of Us" which was designed specifically for this space. The crowd theme is see in two other paintings in the installation. "US and THEM" and "AROUND US" The piece is a collection of different graphic ideas that share a similar graphic aesthetic of primary colors and shapes. The subject matter and varying constructions of the imagery vary in their "realness". Some posters hang off the wall from oversized pins, others are painted directly on the wall. An graphic representation of a Thonet chair is also pinned to the wall, one leg connected surreally to a chair that lies on the ground. As you look at or "read" the piece your understanding of graphics of things, and actual things becomes unclear. Through large scale sculpture and the manipulation of the space I intended objects to become language, and graphics to become things. A large pin casts a painted shadow of a thumb-tack. To put yourself "in the mind" of the pin, it would be as if you looked down at your own shadow but the shadow of a lamp-post or a Nike Swoosh. Inside the small room is a bench with three books sitting on it. If you open the books there are LCD screens that play looping animations of scenes that take place inside my studio. These animations were filmed and animated upstairs in my studio, while the installation was being physically built downstairs. The animations represent a moment in the creative process of creating a large installation like "in the Mind" where anything is possible. For me this is a dark meditative time, an open ended space I call "the white well" a creative moment that you pass through while working towards actually creating something.

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