Attaché

Français

A project by David K. Ross

Since the 1960s, public art galleries in Canada have been using a colour-coded system on the exterior of art transportation crates. Developed to distinguish institutional holdings, the twenty-two designated colours assigned within this system allow gallery staff in every province to quickly identify an artwork’s home institution wherever it may be: on a loading dock, inside an art transport truck, or in a warehouse.

The Attaché project produces large format, close-up images of the painted crate surface from each gallery participating in the identification system. Printed on canvas at a large scale, these colour photographs of paint on plywood reference abstract paintings of the 1960s with their vast expanses of colour, precise surface detail, and attention to format. The Attaché project thus utilizes a language developed for transport logistics and collapses it into two accidentally parallel events — the ascendancy of Colour Field painting and the implementation of a coloured crate identification system — through the merging of painterly and photographic traditions.

The images in Attaché are made using a 4x5 camera modified with laboratory-grade optics and precision-positioning armatures. Focused only on millimetres of each crate’s surface, photographic ‘biopsies’ of pure colour are captured and then enlarged to the same dimensions as the source crate from which the sample image was taken.

A selection of images from this series were exhibited at the Museé d'art contemporain de Montréal from May 20 to September 7, 2010. A site-specific film entitled 396 x 534 x 762 was produced in conjunction with this exhibition.

David K. Ross | Attaché
Exhibition catalogue with essays by Josée Bélisle and Peter White available via ABC Books.