Metamark Clear Vision premium grade perforated one-way window film was used in a mural project. Making its claim and getting noticed more recently is a work that now overlooks a piece of the manmade landscape in Nottingham. It’s a work by noted street artist Anna Wheelhouse and it brings a nucleus of local references to a building that’s undergoing a rebirth in purpose and a changed aesthetic.
Wheelhouse was commissioned by the building’s acquirers, William May Holdings, to provision the work in the interests of bringing life to what was generally thought of as being a dated and purposeless facade. Wheelhouse’s design does just that and manages to bring numerous local references into the visual conversation.
The building’s aspect, proportions, and details fold around Wheelhouse’s design well and engage with the observer by presenting stacks of casually arranged books on ‘shelves.’ Art will always provoke reaction and in this case it’ll be heads tipped to one side to read the titles on spines in some kind of mass-outbreak of human curiosity. The art works at that level of detail and in the macro-scale is a welcome scribble of colour punctuating the local horizon.
With the emphasis on local content, and the building owner’s mission to bring local businesses into the venue, Wheelhouse’s work has commercial purpose but could stand alone if it had to promoting the sentiment and content it embodies. Its design and production traces entirely to Wheelhouse’s female art studio, Bentinck Studios in Radford, and it took Wheelhouse and the women who work there about three weeks to paint. She involved a little support from some local graphic artists to deal with the building’s windows.
The Quadrant building presents a great canvas but is nonetheless a working venue with people inside it whose human comfort needed to be considered. Closing down the view out of the venue by covering its windows wasn’t an option and interrupting the canvas by leaving the window ‘blank’ wasn’t attractive either. Metamark’s Clear Vision window perf was proposed as a solution, tested and given the go-ahead.
The product comprises a laminated construction of print-receptive material that’s black on one of its two sides and white on the other. The black side of the material is supplied coated with a pressure sensitive adhesive and the whole construction is perforated front to back with strategically arranged holes. The material looks solid from the white side and see-through from the black.
Wheelhouse and her team worked elements of the mural’s design on the Metamark Clear Vision on-site for completion at the studio. The Clear Vision was spray painted with the artist’s medium of choice and then applied on site over the building’s windows and into the midst of the mural’s other detail and content. Observers from outside the building perceive a continuous solid surface upon which the mural is painted, while those on the inside have a clear view out.
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