Alive & Course & Strong is a permanent wall-mounted artwork installed at the recently expanded Baird Center, Milwaukee’s convention center. The project recalls the city’s physical presence and the labor, craft, technology, and labor required to build it.

It is a layered photographic collage of four of the Milwaukee area’s most iconic building interiors: City Hall, Alverno College Chapel, and The Milwaukee Art Museum. The combination creates a vertiginous set of perspectives and suggests a varied array of architectural styles and historical eras.

Pattern Details

The artwork is not a flat print but an intricate assembly of materials that serve as the image-substrate creating a textured, physical presence that grounds and enriches the depth of the photographs.

Flatbed Printed Panel

Based on the photographic collage, an intricate pattern of mirror and wood veneer panels were cut and puzzled together and then printed on a large-format flat-bed printer. The grain of the wood and the reflective steel emerge through a pattern of gaps in the printed surface collapsing the space in front of the artwork with space of the 4 buildings captured in the collage.

Team: Luiza De Souza, Zane Mechem

Photography by FreelandBuck

First Image by Frank Juárez/Artdose Magazin