DURATION

When I was awarded this commission, I had never done any mosaic before, and part of the design strategy was to make a mosaic of all my images thus far. That became part of the main design. Now, practically, I was comparing two different technologies: an ancient form of cutting glass pieces and putting them together to shape something, where you could actually cut them in different forms and create a representation, and the idea that I have been using for more than three decades, the computer, to create images based on different kinds of fragments that are called pixels. For me, it was this beautiful language in between. How can I transfer the technology and understand the technique that is so ancient, about putting things together with color and giving them shape? I flew to Germany and met with the artisans who later completed my work. It was an amazing experience because the files were digital, and they needed to be translated. They were very good at the translation. We had an ongoing communication throughout the process. And also, what was interesting, they were able to do printing on ceramics. It was a brand new technique, and I had to use my practice of printing books and being a photographic printer for a while to be able to translate the images that I wanted to be printed onto the ceramics. So it opened up a wide range of curiosities for me that now, when I create different pieces, I always go back to this beautiful moment in 2016 when I was awarded this big commission that was going to be in a subway station of the city where I used to live, Brooklyn, and now it’s there, beautiful.