In Growth

Color Fields

The inspiration for this piece comes from the geometric work of animated or painted color fields that began popularizing in the 1950s. These paintings and videos were works that abstracted ideas and concepts into geometric designs and color theory experiments, producing highly controlled images like those seen in the video above. These paintings were deeply interested in growth and modernism.

In Growth explores the same theme of growth, focusing on the destruction growth leaves in its wake, as the audio may allude to. The audio is sourced from different construction projects around Denver, pointing a microphone at the sounds of progress. The beginning is meant to be ordered beauty, like a Piet Mondrian painting, or those of the color field movment. 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 patterns grows in more and more complexity, until it collapses in on itself. What happens to our history when our forward-looking is prioritized? 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. The ornate buildings of the past are being replaced with colored cubes connected to each other. 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 colored architecture, which creates a nice contrast in older cities, but in newer ones, homogenizes the place we live in.