Crates

Since the mid 1960s, a colour-coded identification system has been in use by Canadian public art galleries enabling curators and technical staff to identify artworks during transport and storage. A specific, designated colour is painted on the exterior of all crates belonging to a given gallery, transforming it into both a storage/transport device and a symbolic envoy for each gallery.

Contemporaneous with the appearance of these coloured crates on the expanding gallery scene in the mid-twentieth century was the ascendancy of Colour Field painting as a major artistic style. The chromatic abstraction and hard-edge painting that dominated the international arena at that time was accompanied by a critical vocabulary that focused specifically on issues of surface, colour, and shape. The Crates project addresses these parallel historical events—the popularity of Colour Field painting and the implementation of a crate identification system.

Crates involves a process in which small surface areas of exhibition traveling crates are photographed using macro-photography. Crates belonging to different institutions in Canada are documented in detail and the resulting images are enlarged to the dimensions of each source crate (in some instances up to 2.5 x 4.5 meters).

Similar in scale to ‘epic’ Colour Field paintings, the images in Crates also mimic classic works of the 1960’s with their vast expanses of colour, precise surface detail, and attention to shape. Hints of underlying woodgrain and indications of industrial painting serve as the only clues to the crates’ non-pedigree origin.

This project provides an opportunity for the high modernist aesthetics of Colour Field painting to collide with the banal and mundane aspects of transport logistics and storage. Shipping crates are the workhorses of the gallery world and are usually viewed as part of a system that guarantees the safe transport and storage of an art work and little else. But they also function in metonymic relationship to their parent institutions, acting as envoys for the galleries they represent as they travel around the province, country and the world. In the course of travel they accumulate an accidental library of gestural marks, scratches, and dents that distinguish one crate from the next.

Crates documents the extraordinary transformation of these ordinary objects in an homage to the silent underside of a dynamic art world, blurring the distinctions between utilitarian object and modernist art work.