The Nothing: Day 2

Day 2: Instillation at the Berkeley Art Museum

It was one o'clock and I was running late for the installment of our fabulous piece at the museum. When I finally arrived there were four people trying to pull together this installation. I was excited with the progress of the piece when I got there and the conversation that was going around. Collaboration is a challenge, but I thought we worked very well in the long run. For the next two hours we got going on our piece. Our original idea for the piece was to install this huge funk explosion on the wall from corner to corner. We wanted the tarp to be the background of the piece and install all of these funky objects on top of it and have the piece coming out at you. When communicating with my fellow collaborators I was informed of the restrictions we had for our piece. Apparently we couldn't bring in a latter nor draw on the wall or paint. We also couldn't put holes in the tarp. We were a little set back and it was a bit of a loss, but I knew we could pull the piece together and make it great. What was on the wall when I got there were a bunch of silver and gold reflective paper and a few funky records. It was a start, but I knew from the restrictions it was getting a bit frustrating. After observing what was already applied on the wall and how the group was feeling, I started throwing out ideas.  I thought it would be a cool idea to hang the tarp on the wall to bring it back to the "minimal" instead of the tarp exposing this "funk". It was time to put away the funk. This was an original idea of mine to only put the tarp on the wall and to hang it in an organic and free formed way. I thought that we had made progress with the "funk" but it was time to cover some of it up. We hung it up very loosely and organically so it came out at you. It was looking very cool. This white tarp that billowed out at you and the funk pouring from the bottom. It was looking AMAZING! I thought that the piece was complete, but some of the other students thought it would be an interesting idea to put some of the colorful, reflective glass below the instillation. And wow! That is exactly what it needed. The lights in the room hit the red, reflective glass so nicely and made a beautiful glow on the wall. It also reflected off of the other reflective paper that was in the piece. I was so satisfied. We cleaned up, took the piece in, and went home.

As I have said, collaboration is a challenge, especially when there are so many talented people with brilliant ideas. I really did enjoy collaborating with this class and thought that we pulled together an amazing and tasteful piece.