Cityscape No. 1

The Material is the Message, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan, so thus began my adventure of interlacing industrial and academic discarded microfilm and repurposing them into large-scale works of art.

The CITYSCAPE series began with the casual re-rolling of hundreds of yards of 16 mm microfilm donated by my friend and artist David Taylor in 1975. The printed imagery on this material documented customer checks, statements, and other financial data in a flowing miniature repeated graphic pattern. Once the design was established the vertical elements were sewn in layers to paper, Lurex, Mylar, and then interlaced in grid patterns on a wall. The stitched, layered, and interlaced images reminded me of aerial views of Los Angeles suburbs where I grew up. Truly, "the material is the message" in this series.

Eventually, I scavenged and recycled 35 mm library microfilm and continued developing the CITYSCAPE theme but creating images that also replicated architectural two-dimensional spaces. Continued investigations with layered space lead to the additions of multiple layers of linear Lurex elements, spray paint, and varying patterns to add more dynamic qualities to the image layers.