dye-sub_on_metal
Document Sample
O n t h e J o b
Pushing the Limits
BY K. SCHIPPER
The new digital mural at Denver International
Airport, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra,
pushes both artistic and technical limits.
ALL PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKE MYERS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.
CLIENT:
Denver International Airport art program, Denver
DESIGNER:
Judith Baca, Los Angeles
To enhance the natural light at the site, Baca used a new metallic digital substrate that is reflective, contains
PRINTER/INSTALLER: light and gives true color to the images.
Pro Graphics & Exhibits, Denver
D enver International Airport has always
had a reputation for pushing the enve-
lope, starting with the circus-tent-like fabric
Program set up at the urging of Denver first
lady Wilma Webb.
“Basically the concept was to offer the
roof of its main terminal and including an opportunity to an Hispanic group and an
automated baggage handling system which African-American group to run their own pro-
led to lengthy delays in the facility’s opening. grams based on the model of the Denver
Now, in one of the last bits of construction Public Art Program. The idea was that there
called for in its initial master plan, the air- would be these pieces of art created from spe-
port has added an experimental piece of cific cultural perspectives.”
large-format digital art that’s also pushing Moore explains that the Denver Public Art
the limits of inkjet printing, substrate and Program was instituted by Denver Mayor
laminate technology. Wellington Webb to reserve 1 percent of
Entitled La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra — capital construction funds for the purchase
Our Land Has Memory, both the artist, and installation of public art.
Judith Baca, and Larry Horowitz, president To administer the Hispanic portion of the
of the Denver-based Pro Graphics & Cultural Perspectives Program, Denver offi-
Exhibits — which printed the project — say cials chose an all-volunteer group, the Denver-
the 10' x 50' mural is not only fine art, but based Chicano Humanities and Arts Council
Artist Judith Baca has been bringing digital a redefinition of what a mural can be. (CHAC). The group then put out a nation-
technology into fine art. She started the first According to Mimi Moore, manager of the wide call for entries, which were then reviewed
fine arts digital mural lab in the country. DIA Art Program, the mural is one of two by two committees — one established by
(Photo courtesy of SPARC) created under a Cultural Perspectives CHAC and the other by the city of Denver.
24 s DIGITAL GRAPHICS s JULY 2000
Among the many photographic
images Baca incorporated in
her mural is a portrait of her
Ultimately it was Judith grandfather, Teodoro.
Baca, a Los Angeles-based
visual artist and experi-
enced muralist, who was
selected to create the
piece. Baca is also senior
professor at the Cesar
Chavez Center at the
University of California
Los Angeles (UCLA) and
on the World Arts and Cultures faculty
there. However, she may be best known
as the artistic director of the Venice,
Calif.-based Social and Public Art
Center (SPARC), which she founded
and which does murals for the city of
Los Angeles.
Although she’s a native of Los Angeles,
Baca’s own family has ties to southern
Colorado. Her grandparents relocated
to La Junta, Colo., after fleeing from
their home in the Mexican state of
Chihuahua during the Mexican civil
war. Her mother grew up there. She says
her own family’s story initially gave her If you look closely, you can see the image
a sense that the commission would be inter- of a miner, though he is lying down. The
esting, although she spent considerable time black-and-white photo, “Mexican miner
putting that story in a larger context. circa 1920,” was used to create the
“What I’m most well-known for is work image. (Photo courtesy of SPARC)
that’s process-based,” Baca explains. “I work
in relationship to the site and the place and
the people. As interested as I am in making
the object that will be placed in the public
setting, I’m also interested in the public who
will be in the setting and about whom the
work is made. I wanted to get a sense of how
people perceived that history and what their
experiences were.”
To do that, Baca began by accepting a
weeklong residency at the University of
Southern Colorado in Pueblo, Colo., where
she worked with students asking them to
recover their family photographs and stories.
“It wasn’t just Hispanic history, it was a
myriad view of immigrant people,” she says.
“I started hearing terms like ‘hard-scrabble’,
and I started getting a clearer idea of what it
was like to face Kansas and how the winds
would sweep in from the plains and the Images steeped with meaning are used
bitter cold and all the things I’d heard throughout Baca’s mural. A Hispanic
described in my mother’s stories.” funeral procession is subtly integrated
The trip to Colorado also allowed Baca to into the mural. (Photo by Juan Espinosa)
visit La Junta where she saw first-hand the
JULY 2000 s DIGITAL GRAPHICS s 25
O n t h e J o b
the country. At UCLA she was funded by
the Digital Media Innovation Program at
the University of California to research new
technological solutions to the production of
large-scale fine art murals.
“I’ve been working in digital imaging for
the last four years or so,” she says. “I believe
most murals are fugitive. You produce them
in paint and they have a life span of 25 years
at most. I was interested in the idea of pro-
ducing a work that I could put on perma-
nent substrates.”
Baca and her students had previously cre-
ated murals that were photographically
Images of human rights activists Cesar based. For this piece she decided to combine
Chavez and Corky Gonzalez were used photographic images with a painted land-
from a photo taken of them at a Colorado scape background. The photos are from
meeting over the UFW grape boycott. both her own family and others collected
(Photo by Juan Espinosa) during her residency at the University of
Southern Colorado. The landscape repre-
sents the collision of the different physical
parts of the journey between her grandpar-
ents’ former home in Hidalgo del Parrel and
southern Colorado.
To enhance the natural light at the site,
Baca also hoped to find a new digital sub-
strate that would be reflective but also con-
tain light while giving true color to her
images.
In that search she was aided by Pro
Graphics’ Horowitz, to whom she was intro-
duced by an acquaintance who knew his
interest in moving his company into the fine
arts market.
“I was looking for somebody who could
Another political image used is that of do the work in the Denver area because I
Reies Tijerina, an advocate for sover- didn’t want to transport the piece,” Baca
eignty of the Spanish land grants. says. “I went to talk to Larry and told him
(Photo courtesy of SPARC) what I was trying to do. What I found was
a willing partner. He was quite generous and
really interested in advancing the technology
segregated neighborhood where her grand- believe the land does carry some power in and the form his company is working in.”
father had bought land, as well as some of memory to it, but people describe it in dif- Horowitz says his company is used to
the double standards that Hispanics in the ferent ways.” taking on the tough jobs. Pro Graphics’
area are subjected to — double standards Ultimately, Baca amassed so much historic slogan is, “Unique Graphic Solutions,” and
that were evidenced by her grandfather’s information that she put up a separate along with exhibits and store and restaurant
neglected gravesite. Website to share her research. At the same interiors the company handles all kinds of
“That brought me to the notion that even time, she began considering how she would special applications. He had already done
as we were returning to the soil, the Mexican present her ideas artistically. Before joining some experimenting with Baca’s first choice
people were seen as a group that had to be the faculty at UCLA, she was on the for a substrate-and-ink method: dye subli-
segregated and not mixed,” Baca observes. founding faculty at California State mation on metal panels.
“That speaks to the idea that the land might University at Monterey Bay, where she “But, the colors just didn’t come out well,”
have memory. All people in some way stared the first fine arts digital mural lab in Horowitz says.
26 s DIGITAL GRAPHICS s JULY 2000
were easily handled by the company’s Onyx
RIP. Perhaps it’s a credit to all the prepress
work that went into the project, but he says
color matching only required a few profiles.
Baca credits her technical assistant, Farhad
Akhmetov, as having a hugely significant
role the prepress process. “He is the System
Administrator in the SPARC/UCLA Cesar
Chavez Digital Mural Lab, the research
facility where the mural was built,” Baca
says. “He worked every hour with me to
solve the technical difficulties created by file
size, seams, problematic scans, resolution
and color matching.”
Eventually the job was output at Pro
Graphics in 30" x 60" panels, then
mounted and laminated. The panel size was
geared for ease of handling and replacement
in case any of the panels became damaged
— an airport requirement.
Pro Graphics also did the installation.
The worker’s tent city during the coal miners’ Actual production of the finished piece took
strike of 1914 in Ludlow, Colorado is incorpo- less than two months.
rated in the mural as well. (Photo from the Both Baca and Pro Graphics’ Horowitz say
Denver Historical Archives) they’re very pleased with the results.
“It’s quite an interesting piece,” says
Horowitz. “Judy did a marvelous job on it,
Ultimately, it took the duo almost two and the photos ghosted into the mural
years of experimenting with substrates, create an outstanding effect. It’s gratifying to
inks and laminates before agreeing to utilize camera (even under controlled-lighting con- be involved in something like this.”
the company’s Hewlett-Packard inkjet ditions) complicated the job, Baca says. Also “It’s really not like anything I’ve ever seen,”
printers to print on a gold-colored alu- added to the mix were the original photo- says Baca. “There’s not a dot matrix visible;
minum substrate, whose manufacturer both graphs Baca had chosen for the composi- you walk right up to the piece and see a con-
he and David Walker, the Pro Graphics’ art tion, which were enlarged to 8" x 10" trans- tinuous tone. The colors are exquisitely
director, decline to name. parencies and scanned on a drum scanner. accurate with my painting. The surface cap-
For a laminate, the printer chose a poly- The entire project ultimately took up some tures the light of the window and keeps it in
carbonate film, only partly because of the nine gigabytes of computer space. the piece. And, the combination of the pho-
protection it will provide from the traveling Pro Graphics’ Walker says from there, the tographic apparitions and the hand painting
public. project was broken back into five smaller gives it a quality that’s other-worldly.”
“Although we’d used the gold-colored files, which were color corrected and seamed She adds, “I’ve very proud of it; I think it’s
material, the laminate muted that down,” using Adobe Photoshop®. Baca says that at a really beautiful piece.”
says Horowitz. “It gave the gold a very times she was working literally pixel by pixel. The mural was dedicated in mid-April,
earthy tone, a gold earth tone which Both say the sheer size of the files was a and more than a score of Baca’s relatives
matched the skin tone of the people and the problem. were on hand for the occasion. They then
color of the land in Colorado. It’s very col- “At one point, we had a hard drive with traveled on to La Junta, where she believes
orful and very brilliant.” something like 25 gigabytes of space on it,” the mural’s story really ends.
“That laminate actually captures the light,” says Baca. “But, we could only transport one “We reclaimed my grandfather’s grave and
says Baca. “It gives it a reflective surface, so segment at a time into the piece and we were we put a new stone on it and began the
it seems to capture the light of the window doing all these multiple pieces. I probably clean-up of the Mexican part of the grave-
which then stays inside the piece.” should have painted the piece at a different yard,” she says. “To go to where the dead lie
Completing the piece was no easy task. scale; that was certainly one of the prob- and to recover that site, I feel like the story
While the two were experimenting with lems.” has come full circle.”
substrates and laminates, Baca took an aca- “We could probably have made the files
demic quarter off from her teaching career smaller, but she (Baca) didn’t want to for rea- Baca’s Website on La Memoria de Nuestra
to devote full time to finishing the back- sons relating to quality of the images,” says Tierra — Our Land Has Memory can be
ground, which took almost nine months to Walker. “We talked about lowering the res- found at www.arts-civic.org/baca. It can also
complete at half scale. olution to a 600 dpi file, but we built them be linked through the SPARC Website —
It was then photographed in segments to size so they were pretty big.” www.sparcmurals.org.
because of its size. Flashes from the digital And, despite the file sizes, Walker says they
JULY 2000 s DIGITAL GRAPHICS s 27
O n t h e J o b
For more information on Pro Graphics &
Exhibits, the Web address is www.pro-
denver.com
Some of the painted
elements were based on K. Schipper is a staff writer
photos as well. Here the for National Business Media,
Mesa Verde Anasazi cliff and a regular contributor to
dwellings are depicted. Digital Graphics, A&E and
(Photo courtesy of SPARC) Restyling magazines.
A haunting image of a beautiful Cheyenne woman and her
child, survivors of the Sand Creek massacre, is used on the
road traveled by the large figures in the mural. (Photo from
the Denver Historical Archives)
Despite all the complex imagery and the intricate
technology used, Baca’s mural, when taken as a
whole makes for a very pleasing addition to
Denver’s airport.
28 s DIGITAL GRAPHICS s JULY 2000
