Dear Friends,
I want to share a new piece with you I finished end of last year at the Convention Center in Seattle.
All the best,
Christian
Pins was conceived for the purpose of activating a mute concrete façade belonging to an 1980s-era convention center. It is a composition comprised of large, convex aluminum discs, coated in high-gloss epoxy paint in a range of colors, and projected slightly from the wall that supports them, tilting this way and that. The discs are mounted atop short brass-colored rods, a detail that endows them with the unmistakable appearance of thumbtacks.
Pins is explicitly representational. A tiny, throwaway item from the office-supply store has been enlarged to heroic proportions. At 70 inches (ca. 178 cm) in diameter, the part of these tacks that is normally sized to our thumbs assumes the dimensions of an entire body. Accordingly, we can associate them with people, which makes good sense considering that this is a convention center, a place of public gathering. These discs are arranged in an irregular row, clustering here and dispersing there in a manner that seems more motivated than random. Pins operates somewhat like an ancient processional frieze: when scanned from one end to the other, its static forms are stirred to life. Because this work is located in Seattle, Washington, a city not lacking in rainfall, one might well imagine that it represents a parade of umbrella-wielding citizens, as observed from the top of the building.
The text of this post is by Jan Tumlir and taken from my new book with Lars Müller Publishers due out in September 2024.