London Calling / Broken Record
Year: Dec. 12, 2023
Dimensions: w13 x d12 x h24 in.
Material: PLA filament, "A Place of Hiding" by Elizabeth George, aluminum wire, cardboard, photo paper, hot glue, UHU glue stick, and 5 x 4 in. canvas boards.
In my final Mixed Media project, I found a lot of successes and challenges throughout. I want to start by thanking Marc for helping me test laser cutting through a vinyl record, through tests of trial and error. I couldn’t be happier with the result and assembly of the record, from the clean horizontal cuts to the perfect 3-millimeter holes for the wire. Also with the help of the laser cutter, I etched into five by-four-inch canvases to create Marky Ramone, on drums for The Ramones, and Paul Simonin, bassist for The Clash, upfront. With scorch marks and tape residue left on both, the laser cutter naturally followed suit of the grunge, punk-rock theme. To show the least obvious construction, the wire stand holding up both Ramone and Simonin is one piece, also showing unity amongst different bands within the same revolution of music. Although I am now extremely elated with the final product, there were quite a few adversities in the process.
First, the aluminum wire I chose is much thicker and harder to bend than I originally anticipated. Also, the wire refuses to attach to itself, as well as needs quite a bit of hot glue to stick to other surfaces. Inspired by Su Blackwell’s scene creation using wires in books, I drill-pressed 8 calculated holes, 6-millimeter in diameter to allow for two wires to pass through, into the glued-shut book. The assembly consisted of cutting, molding, and tediously bending wire to wrap around the other wire structure. Disregarding the time it took to do so, placing and sticking the record pieces really brought it to life. Moving forward, with the help of my housemate, Tai, as he owns a 3d printer, I was able to wire and glue the letters of The Clash album cover I intended to represent, London Calling. To match the pattern of the lines on the vinyl record stage, I decided to use black filament (made of PLA) to print the letters.
Bringing the piece together, I added two boards of “punk-rock” crowds. Mixing and mashing royalty-free images of unique or wild fan photographs into Photoshop, I made a select few edits across all images to emulate the style of Jamie Reid’s concert and music artwork; turning all images to black and white and creating halftones to achieve the grainy look. Imitating a collage, each 12-inch-long board has only one piece of paper attached, with imagined white cut-out borders separating the images, also in efforts to pay homage to Reid’s style. Lastly, I painted the back of each solid black so whichever way you are looking at the stage, the crowd panel farthest from you will be a shadow silhouette in contrast.