Extended Family – Curtain Wall

For nine years I worked at the GM Scarborough Van Plant and found within it an extended family that cared for it’s members, who nurtured each other through tough times. The Van Plant community was a network which crossed boundaries of race, culture, gender, and age. The generosity of spirit and action of it’s inhabitants was both touching and comforting.

Inspired by the spirit of my coworkers, I created the Extended Family project as a tribute to them. In shooting these photographs I focused on the following themes; the work, which draws everyone together and provides a common purpose, the community, which provides respite from the drudgery, the individuals who give the community its face, their artifacts, through which the work environment is humanized and me into habitat, and both as a sculptural artifact, and as an organic form with its own crude beauty. Underlying all of that, is of course, the very subjective theme of my own relationship to all of these parts.

The installation will be a curtained glass wall, providing a view into the experience of the space, symbolic of this era of industry. This wall will contain a collage of images culled from the 4000 photographs shot throughout the life of the project, which h a span of 10 years active shooting, with the bulk of the work done in the six months prior to the plant closure.

The images will be scanned and collaged in Photoshop, then screen printed onto one side of a sheet of tempered glass with one side sandblasted to provide the opaque ground for the ink. This sheet will then be laminated to a second protective layer of glass and sealed against the elements. The tempering of the glass will assure reasonable protection from vandalism and the inks and laminating glues will be UV resistant.

The 11 x 14” panes of glass will then be installed in a custom-built mullioned window frame that will be galvanized and powder coated to protect against oxidization. There will be 75 panels in the frame. Some panels will contain an entire collage, others will hold sections of a larger collage, as if we are peering through the glass into the interior.

The project will use 70 – 100 images. Some will be repeated in the composition to mimic the activity of the production line, others will be presented more simply as individual images of powerful content.

The total cost for the production and framing of this presentation will be $65,500.

This proposal does not make provision for site preparation, engineers fees and insurance for the installation. ditionally, for the purpose of night time viewing, lighting would be a desirable element, but is not detailed in this quote as the variables are unknown.