Photo courtesy Irene Grau
Spanish artist Irene Grau made tracings and castings of spray-painted construction symbols.
When Spanish artist Irene Grau was in Madison for a fellowship at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, she noticed the baffling series of characters and symbols scrawled across the pavement in colored spray paint.
These markings became the basis for Construction Season, her show on display in the museum’s State Street Gallery until Aug. 5.
The most prominent aspect of the multimedia show involves a series of laser-cut iron pieces that came from tracings of road work markings Grau gathered during her six-week residency in the summer of 2017.
They initially seem like characters plucked from an ancient runic alphabet: inscrutable and strange. From pink circle to white arrows to electric-green line segments, many of these symbols hand-picked from Madison-area construction projects cover the floor of the gallery space.
But Grau believes there’s a logic to the symbols: “At first they seem cryptic but they’re really not.”
After examining the markings, Grau researched the history and meaning behind them. She learned that a 1976 explosion in Culver City, California, caused by workers tapping into a gasoline pipeline, prompted the creation of a set of regular symbols known as DigAlert; this prompted the American Public Works Association to create a standardized color system for construction symbols to keep workers and contractors safe. Red markings indicate power lines or electricity; orange signals indicate communication lines or conduits; blue represents potable water; and green means sewage.
Grau chose to make her symbols out of iron, explaining, “Iron is always a construction material; that was a part of it. I wanted something not super heavy, but that still has the feeling of an object.”
The artist also worked with the museum to install carpet in the gallery space, imitating the concrete pavement workers would so often destroy and recreate. It also provides a cushion for gallery-goers who might want to get on the floor and rearrange the symbols that make up much of the show.
Photos courtesy Irene Grau
The exhibit includes items that were accidentally touched with paint.
“I wanted the space to feel like it was under construction as well,” says Grau, who also incorporates objects — rocks, twigs or other detritus — that were accidentally touched with spray paint during the commission of other markings. Starting just after her residency, Grau encouraged MMoCA guests to scour Madison for these items by putting out a public call. “Then the construction madness started,” says Grau, noting while back in Spain she received photos, usually via email, of items retrieved for the show. So many were collected that only a portion of them were able to be used in the show.
Ultimately, the goal of Construction Season, either through handling and manipulation of symbols themselves or the actual collection of roadside flotsam, was to change the points of view of museum-goers, allowing them to notice the markings that surround them and to recognize their beauty.
“No one pays attention to these normally; I wanted to infect their gaze,” says Grau. “One of the only things I can give to the public is my particular gaze.”
