Urban Panneaux by [Losett]2
The Urban Panels series investigates the most mundane of city vistas—sidewalks—reconsidering the sidewalk panel as a concise, meaning-laden urban sign.
This multi-panel mixed-media relief panneaux reinterprets slate, granite and concrete pavers, iron grates and industrial manhole covers. The Panels consider these utilitarian objects as documents of industrial, labor, and urban history and as signposts of the metropolis’ tap into natural resources.
The Panels’ titles open up conceptual, environmental, and social dimensions, some of them counterintuitive and ironic. The artwork plays on the objects’ rich associations: accidental footprints and intentional scribbles transform concrete slabs into fossilized relics. Manhole covers and contractors’ stamps dot sidewalks like official seals or commemorative plates. The erosion from foot traffic carves slate pavers into raised-relief terrains. And in Nature’s eternal cycles, leaves land on sidewalks and pass out of existence, except for fleeting imprints, and rain, sunlight and shadows lend them a transitory poetry.
This monumental sculptural relief panneaux presents nine 36”x36” relief panels designed for vertical or horizontal installation and for arrangement into a variety of configurations to work with diverse spaces. The Panels in the panneaux evolved directly from the elaborate sand, sawdust, cardboard and gesso substrates of the early painterly Panels, and are mostly constructed rather than cast. More than any other of reliefs in the Urban Panels series they focus on the formal properties of urban surfaces. They play with the expressive possibilities of positive and negative relief and investigate the break up of continuous horizontal surface into elaborate shapes located in various horizontal planes. To amplify these formal investigations, off-white positive relief panels are juxtaposed with negative relief panels in dark grey graphite.
Three panels are currently completed and six are to follow.