The Pioneer Works fence
Two hundred and fifty square meters of painting wrapped around Pioneer Works, the Center for Art and Innovation in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Most of it stood until the end of 2020, one stretch longer than that, and then it did what a painted fence does.
I filled the fence with the vocabulary I had been building for years: arches, azulejo blues, Adinkra and arabesque forms pushed into a one-point perspective so the wavy boards open into impossible spaces. The blue and white patterns as the tales of the Silk Roads.
People leaned on it, walked past it every morning, photographed themselves against it, parked in front of it. Plants grew and died on top of the blue, the harsh weather did its magic. The work is finished by the environment.
The blue is the constant, and the perspective does the rest.
For four years the fence was a backdrop for other people’s pictures. These are some of the posts that came back: portraits, dogs, weddings, skateboards, first days of school. And the plants.
By September 2021 the sun, the salt air and four Red Hook winters had done their work on the art. I went back and photographed it panel by panel: the blue gone chalky, the stencils half eaten, rust coming up through the pattern, paint lifting off in sheets, and a surveillance notice bolted straight through the painting.
A mural outdoors is a slow performance and this is its last act.
The fence exists now as photographs, and as several thousand pictures on other people’s phones.
Ethnocomputing Experiments
The fence was not the only thing I made there. In April 2018, back inside the building, Wenqi Li and I showed Ethnocomputing Experiments: Chokwe Sona patterns from Angola redrawn in Processing along the heritage algorithm that produced them, projected over a painting built from Vredeman de Vries’ seventeenth-century treatise on linear perspective.
It is the same argument as the fence, made indoors and with code: two mathematical ways of handling a line, put in one room.