PHXated went down to the Phoenix Art Museum today to see the final laps of a three-day marathon of art installation in the contemporary wing.

The work is Peter Wegners “Guillotine of Shade, Guillotine of Sunlight.” Here’s a shot of how it looked as of about 8:30 this a.m.:

pam_installation_longshot

This is just one side of it: The work consists of two walls, each fronted with colored card stock—no fewer than 1.4 million individual cards set upright and perpendicular against the walls. A total of nearly three dozen people have been working on the piece since Monday.

Wegner achieves the spectacular color effect by slowly altering the ratio of red to yellow cards in each successive row.

The cards are specially cut to hang on brackets:

PAM_cards

Each row uses four boxes of cards; there are 22 rows on each wall, or 44 total, meaning 176 boxes, if I’m doing the math correctly. Peter Nelson, who with Adan Mendoza is in charge of the installation, told me he figured the boxes were 80 to 100 pounds each … meaning the whole thing might weigh more than seven tons.

Indeed, the wall itself is 18 inches thick; Sara Cochran, the museum’s contemporary art curator, said the museum considers the work permanent.

Here’s the other side:

pam_installation_green_side

Peter Wegner’s web site is here, incidentally. And here’s a pretty good interview with him.

The work will debut before the public Dec. 4, which is not only First Friday but the museum’s 50th anniversary. Wegner’s piece is one of more than fifty new works donors have come together to give the museum for the occasion, all of which will be on display for the first time that day.

Cochran pointed out one other new work, a large-scale painting by Kehinde Wiley, from a series on young men from the favela slums in Brazil posed in heroic positions taken from famous works of art in that country. Here’s a detail of it:

pam_favela_boys