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I will be displaying large color photographs (up to 48"X96") and would like some input on creative ways of displaying them. I have used 1/2 inch Gatorfoam to mo unt them, and given that mat board is not made large enough, I simply framed the images with a spacer and plexi on the front. Any other recommendations on creat ively hanging large images?
Thanks- Jon
Are these going to be permanent, or just temporary?...and have you mounted them yet? And what kind of use, i.e. art or exhibit/trade show type display?...there are alot of options here...
Okay, I'll take another stab at it...I was going to suggest having them mounted on Gator board over Gator foam. We do a couple of murals a year, and some Ciba trans stuff as well, and have them mounted on a variety of materials. A 4x8 sheet of gator board is much more rigid and durable than gator foam. The foamboard can get dinged up easily, especially in the corners, and also the surface can get dimpled. Gator board comes in sheets, in different colors (a solid black for instance), and in thicknesses up to an inch. You can cut it on a table saw, or a panel cutter for getting smooth, square cuts. The best material to mount a mural on is Sintra. This is really just a solid sheet of compressed PVC. You can buy it from plastics suppliers in 4x8 sheets, but it's expensive...it runs about $100 a sheet. But, you can do anything to it. It's like a sheet of plywood, you can route it, drill it, whatever...it's waterproof...it's a great exhibit construction material and very durable for murals...
Uhm, we're split between working for the collections part of the museum, and the exhibits shop....when I say "we", understand that I'm talking about a construction/design shop with technicians, carpenters, silkscreeners etc..
We farm our murals out now, and the biggest ones we do are about 4, 4x8 panels...we'll seam these together.You can do about anything with them really...they can be the focus of an exhibit, or just an element, like wallpaper almost, or a graphics panel....usually we mount them to a wall with alot of Scotch double stick foam tape, or a construction adhesive...the problem with this is that you'll either destroy the wall or the mural when trying to remove it....if it's in a high traffic area, we'll get a lustre laminate over the surface to protect the image....When you get bigger than 4x8, plex is hard to get...although we have some custom sheets for ciba-trans that are much bigger...
Creative ways? Well...you can first-surface mount to a sheet of plexiglass...the emulsion is mounted to the plex...you can use Sintra and do profile cuts around the image using a roto-zip, or a bandsaw...you can "ghost" an image to a lighter tone, and mount smaller prints to it...you can wrap them around circular walls...we did a mural last year, in 2 pieces. It was a shot of an old building (a historical photo), and had 2 murals made of it, only one was slightly bigger than the other. The big one was mounted to the wall (it was 2 4x8s seamed). The smaller one (seamed as well) was cut out around the shape of the building...and blocked out, and mounted just in front of the other..so it created this 3-D effect...
If you look at them as exhibit elements, you can do just about anything with them...we had to make a 1:1 reproduction of a painting last year, and it was going to have to be done in 2 parts and seamed as a cibachrome...well, this couldn't do, so we had it output as an inkjet on canvas, and stretched the canvas just like a painting and framed it. It looked great, and is hanging in a gov't. building here now...it just comes down to what your end use needs to be....for this stuff, it's short to mid-run exhibits, not really fine art....