Title: Story line

Client: Renaud-Bray | ARCHAMBAULT

Interior headquarters lobby mural intervention, Fall 2018

Coordinator: Louis-Nicolas Coupal of ARTGANG

Location: Renaud-Bray ARCHAMBAULT Headquarters, Montreal Quebec

Details: Acrylic polymer on drywall. 100’w x 6’h.
This mural honors books as objects, writing as both a creative and a mechanical process, and the process of constructing narrative, especially in fiction. Beginning with the main concept of storyline, I designed the mural around the interlocking principles of mirroring, unfolding, and bracketing. I see these as core modes of building story, and created particular design elements that would reproduce these visually. The half-circle shape at the “beginning” of the mural signals a page turning; the mirroring seen throughout the piece symbolizes parallel storylines; the round-edged brackets gesture toward sub-plots or stories within stories. More broadly, the repetition with a difference that shapes the forward flow of the mural speaks to the motifs, symbols and conflicts that recur in works of literature and scholarship. In terms of palette, I took inspiration from the geometric cover art found on science and math instructional books from the 1960s and 70s. Returning to the core principles of interlock, repetition, and development, I avoid harsh colors or extremes of light and dark in favor of color gradation, transparencies, and the development of interlocking color fields that produce new colors through overlap. I wanted the mural to be something that the inhabitants of the space could read, looking up from their work, scanning the piece, and finding new elements or points of focus and meaning each time.