Color’s Ordinates And Affinities: Instructions For Chromatic Living

This series developed through my encounter with one of the special collections at the University of Iowa during my 2011-12 residency there as a Grant Wood Fellow in Painting. I was inspired by the conceptual work from the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC). Central to this collection are the “easily reproducible,” fragile blueprint drawings that were made in the 1970s for an unprecedented exhibition titled “Towards a Profile of Latin American Art,” a collaboration among an international collective of conceptual artists seeking to establish connections between North and South America. I seek to reinterpret a social, utopian sensibility that characterized this gesture. “Color’s Ordinates and Affinities: Instructions for Chromatic Living,” a solo exhibit at the ABW Gallery, consisted of a constellation of re-arrangable works with instructional texts as labels, which in turn became the basis for the subsequent “Never Underestimate a Monochrome” at the museum the following fall. [photos: Jesse James Sinclair]