In Growth

Color Fields

This video is inspired by the Color Field painting and video movement from the 1950s and 60s. These works of art were the ultimate expression of abstract modernism, bringing the ideas of progress to their simplest end: geometric colored patterns. The movement was in response to abstract expressionism, making the expressionism more geometric and concrete.

In Growth explores the same theme of growth, focusing on the destruction growth leaves in its wake, as the audio may allude to. The beginning is meant to be ordered beauty, like a Piet Mondrian painting. While the different patterns of beams move at different rates, and collide with each other to create a fluctuating grid, a “canvas” appears, in negative, to really draw the eye to that pattern, the geometric and ordered beauty we are creating. The patterns grows in more and more complexity, until it collapses in on itself. All of a sudden, the geometry is meant to be overwhelming, dull, and destructive, hence the use of reds and blacks in a very simple pattern. The beauty that once was there is quickly covered up by a slipshod stair-stepped design. While growth can be this beautiful and productive thing, the manner in which growth is achieved can be incredibly poor. Using Denver as an example, it is positive that the city is growing so much, but its manner of growth is incredibly large apartment complexes that all have the exact same simple geometric and highly saturated color architecture, which creates a nice contrast in older cities, but in newer ones, homogenizes them.

The audio for the video was entirely gathered from these kinds of buildings being constructed around the city. Every hammer hit is being used to build a building made up of colored cubes.