Can't use gum in Singapore.
Can't use gum in Singapore.
Was at a Ed Burtynsky show at the Royal Ontario Museum here in Toronto last friday and to my surprise all of the prints were mounted to dibond, float mounted a bit back in a floater frame with no glass or plexi on front. Really surprised me as there were over 40 - 40 x50 prints on display.. title of the show was Oil.
big chunky frames , print sitting right there for all to touch .
Whatever is really cool right now will be passe tomorrow. Burtynsky and his frames included in that prediction. I'm more practical, and sure am glad my own big prints were
behind acrylic when one of the house cats decided to take a wizz at it.
Singapore, ha!
I cut this print to 8x10 and stuck it in a stock frame right against the glass with no mat. I hated to do it but it beats having a school portrait in the hall.
Thanks,
Kirk
at age 73:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
That's true for any presentation, including the black frames and white mats that were cool for much of the 20th century. It really doesn't matter. Most of my work is framed exactly like that, and it's fine, because it suits the work. One of the reasons you see a lot of contemporary work mounted simply and without glass is that this presentation likewise suits it.
The good news is that the world is whole lot less dogmatic about this stuff now. There's no single right way. You could mount your prints on bear skin rugs if you wanted. People will laugh at you if it doesn't make sense for the work, but only the fuddy-duddies will say it's "wrong."
EigerStudios
Museum Quality Drum Scanning and Printing
I was remodeling (still am). All the big prints were already sold or wrapped up for storage. But in the interim I hung a big leftoever with some mounting failure (blisters)
from some past experiment. The cat jumped on a table to get at it. He died from old age and, despite his felonies, was buried in a fresh shoe box sprinkled with catnip, presumably to join the mummified cats of the pharaoh's and defile things in the afterlife. One of my favorite stories is how Salvador Dali and his wife walked into a
dealer with their two famous pet ocelots on leash. One of them sprayed a couple of
Durer etchings. When the gallery owner made a fuss, Dali commented that, "a mess of
Dali's is a masterpiece", whereupon the owner promptly doubled the asking price of
those particular etchings.
Nothing like a cat you have to pick the right time to give it up before it gets old enough to figure out it can eat you.
Getting back to OP's question, I often think about skipping glass and presenting my prints open to air under a mat carefully cut to crop the image. Not dry-mounted but held in place by tape or tabs.
I've got a vintage '78 black and white print framed in a sanded, salvaged window with brown mat. The antique wavy glass (perfect size for contact printing) spent more time out of the frame than in it. Eventually it broke. For its thin film of dust, a couple dents and a stain you have to look hard to see, the 35mm print that looks like 4x5 still inspires me as I walk out the front door where it hangs. Black and white can take it.
I've a similar vintage Larry Ulrich color print under glass that looks much worse for wear. Color isn't necessarily going to survive, even under glass.
Surprisingly, chopping up the bubble-gum alley portrait didn't ruin the composition. But the print hanging in the hall lost the gum that looks like a skull.
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