Painted Over/Under
Detail from one of the walls
Partial wall from the final removal of the vinyl under drawing
Detail from one of the walls showing the projects underneath
Detail from one of the walls showing the projects underneath
Detail from one of the walls showing the projects underneath
Painted Over/ Under: Parts 1-4 installation images
2011
paint and pen on wall
126' x 14'
In 2010, I was invited by Carol Stakenas to participate in the year-long “Public Interest” project at LACE. The challenge was to instigate a malleable surface on the walls of the space that would shift and evolve over the course of the year allowing for different events and activities while at the same time ultimately resolving itself into a defined work of my own. This final work relied on reflecting the history of the wall’s surface as it changed throughout the year. In the end, "Painted Over/Under: Parts 1-3" involved three arts disciplines, twenty-five local, national, and international artists and three curators.
I’m struck by how a city’s walls inevitably follow a cycle of graffiti and subsequent cover-up—like a canvas that gets intermittently scraped and re-painted but never returns completely to the blankness of the original. It is the ‘not quite blankness’ of an off white square floating on a sun-bleached wall obscuring a vandal’ s mark that I take as my inspiration for this project. I was curious to see if I could transpose such energy from the strictly urban setting to one of cultural production (ie. an art space).
I began the project by producing a drawing that would circle the entire gallery on over 126’ of vinyl cut masking (a big sticker) in multiple sections. Then three guest curators were invited to select authors, artists, and architects to create projects for the walls. Once completed and shown, these projects were painted over with mismatched cover-up paint much like graffiti is dealt with. Prior to erasing these projects, however, vinyl pieces of my drawing are used to mask out portions of each work. This is repeated with each new part of the project, preserving a history of the entire project. The final part, which you are viewing now, involved the removal of all the vinyl masking creating a wall drawing constructed out of the previous parts.
-Kim Schoenstadt
Venice, Ca. 2011
