“Iridescent Mountains Made in LA”, 2014, 5’X3’X18”

Fiberglass, Chameleon auto body paint, seamless birch pedestal, 12.5 hours of perfect blue sky projected in the background
 

(projection behind “Iridescent Mountains Made in LA”)

“Perrrrrrrfect Blue Sky”, 2014, Dimensions variable, 12.5 minutes

**Video for this exhibition**

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Iridescent Mountains was created as a reaction to the Los Angeles culture surrounding sensational actions within an environment whose identity is difficult to define.  Michael Heizer notably made an artwork entitled, “Levitated Mass” that consisted of a 340 ton boulder that fell off of a cliff in a rock quarry in Riverside California.  Through great effort and significant disruption to the road ways between where the boulder fell and its resting place on the Los Angeles County Museum’s Campus, Heizer effectively moved one place into another.  This action coincided with typical Long Beach, and other Southern California landscape design tropes in that he made one place look like another, contributing to the feeling of placelessness I felt living there.  The overlap of identities became yet another line of authentication that blurred identifiable distinction.  

 

I scanned a portion of his boulder using basic photo scanning techniques and carved the resulting digital 3D model out of high density urethane foam, using a 3axis CNC machine.  From there, I  made a semi-flexible fiberglass and rubber mold (similar to the way Ron Mueck works) to cast the shape in fiberglass resin.  After finishing and painting the surface with chameleon, color changing auto body paint, the polygonal facets sparkle and oscillate between colors ranging from magenta, to purple, to pink, and blue.   As you walk around it, the colors shift from one to another much in the same way that local landscape identities did for me along walks and drives.