During the 2002-2003 television season, Tucson was the backdrop for
the show Greetings From Tucson. “Backdrop” may be too strong of
a word, since filming took place in Hollywood. But once in a while, you
could catch a quick glimpse of something familiar—a desert road,
a cactus or a mountain range. The show certainly didn’t do Tucson
justice.
Longtime Tucsonans complain about how our town is represented by
Hollywood. You see a tumbleweed, coyote, lizard or cactus, and that’s
it. There’s little representation of what’s really here.
One thing often missing from these representations is our vibrant
public art. Drive down a city street, and you will undoubtedly see a
colorful mural on a wall. Culture weaves with art, as Mexican, Indian
and Anglo influences are presented. A good place to see numerous murals
online is at Randy Garsee’s blog, tucsonmurals.blogspot.com.
But as of this writing, there’s one mural that isn’t on Garsee’s
blog, because it’s not a traditional wall painting.
It’s also not located at an outdoor location, but instead, it can be
found at the Tucson Mall. Created by native Tucsonan Brian Richard
Goodell, the mural is a collage of 13,000 photos, measuring 54 feet
wide by 12 feet tall. Included are 250 original photos of various
mall-related scenes, including store fronts, merchandise and food. It’s
located on the second floor near Dillard’s.
The mall mural isn’t Tucson-specific, but Goodell is working on a
large-scale piece called the Tucson Collage Project. He aims to collect
2,000 photos from Tucsonans and display the work in a public area.
So far, 150 people have uploaded photos to his Web site, www.artzayak.com/mega. While a few
have snuck in from Mexico and Australia, most photos are of Tucson
families and locales. There’s a photo of two people standing next to
the Sidewinders mascot, three guys in front of the Rialto marquee,
cactus scenes and a lightning-streaked desert sky.
Since Goodell has yet to find a sponsor and a display space, he is
open to various possibilities about what his collage will eventually
entail. But he hopes to retain the local angle.
Goodell’s creation won’t be a bunch of photos arranged together
haphazardly. His collages are made of many photos, with a main photo
that is overlaid on top; that is what you see first. It’s a bit of an
optical illusion.
“From a distance of 10 to 20 feet away, you see a photo. When you
get a few inches away, you see that the main photo is made up of
hundreds of smaller photos,” he explains.
Goodell’s work started in November while he was looking for a
birthday present for his wife. “I wanted to get her something
interesting. I had seen collages of Marilyn Monroe and Bob Marley, and
I wondered how they were made. I searched on the Web and found
(software) that would do what I wanted.”
Goodell took 2,200 different family photos measuring three-quarters
of an inch wide and then picked a main image of him and his wife. Stand
back from the poster, and you see two smiling faces. Stand close, and
you see the individual photos. (See our Web site or artzayak.com for the art.)
Goodell says his wife’s reaction was “shock and amazement for a
whole hour. She wasn’t expecting something like that. It was fun
finding each photo and (recalling) the memories of each photo.”
The reaction from his wife interested him enough to start a collage
service for others. “People have a gazillion photos in photo books.
Time goes by, and you don’t look at them. It’s an artistic way of
taking 50, 100 or hundreds of individual memories that you cherish and
being able to walk by them on a daily or weekly basis. It’s like a
photo album in a snapshot.”
Goodell says his interest is to bring people together with his
collages. He seeks the personal touch. “If people can bring family or
hobbies into it, they’d appreciate it.”
He also appreciates that large murals and collages can add to the
community. “Instead of just being a collage of something, to me, it’s
more interesting if it’s made from people who live in that
area—for them to know it, see it and talk about it.”
Goodell hopes the main overlay photo of his Tucson Collage Project
will be a wrap of the mountains and downtown Tucson. From the distance,
the large mural would display our town’s physical surroundings. But up
close, viewers could see thousands of smiling Tucsonan faces. That
would make Goodell’s creation yet another example of local, vibrant
art.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2009.
