The Somnambulist Installation

The goal of the project was to install a large art display in our studio on a tiny budget.  We chose Joey’s painting, “Somnambulist”, because it was strictly black and white.  This meant that we could print it cheaply on a black and white laser printer at a local copy shop for very little cost, and then we could tile it all out on the wall.

We assembled our crew of young artists.  A couple of our crew leaders organized the tiles into numbered rows, so that we could assemble the rows asynchronously without losing track of what tiles went where.  Then they began to pass out and delegate tiles to our young crew, who either passed those tiles up to Joey and some other assemblers, or they climbed up and installed the tile themselves.

“Somnambulist” is a term that means “sleep walker”. This piece was the child of Joey’s story-telling style of painting. “There’s no particular meaning to the painting,” Joey said. “There was no real plan, except that I wanted to experiment with scale relationships between elements in a composition with one or more vanishing points. Other than that, I just started with a simple mockup I put together in one of my playground apps, and then I allowed my mind to explore a whole new world as the components of the painting slowly came together. I named the final piece Somnambulist, because at one point I imagined that maybe this giant floating head was dreaming, or that maybe he was suddenly waking up."

The installation probably took around 3 hours, including the final frame. It was a good time for everyone, and a great example of what we can achieve when we work together even just a little bit.