Danny Treacy’s work Grey Area is captivating. Treacy takes abandoned areas paints them grey, then photographs them. They are elevated by the paint, made into sculptural pieces, and then privileged by being photographed. They are mundane, banal spaces made special by the act of recording them. This work resonates with me and my concrete slabs, in time Treacy’s work returns to the abandoned spaces, starting with the peeling of the paint. Concrete slabs are rendered on my new buildings, erasing all trace of the migrant hands who built them.
We both focus on the banal, an in our effort to elevate them to places of interest we engage in different approaches. Treacy by painting the actual spaces, and my work by transferring the images to printmaking paper and layering with airport tarmac lines. Adding at this point that Treacy’s work is clean and uncomplicated, mine is not, but I aim to address this.
Critical Research Journal: De Ferrier 