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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

arts

New mural arrives at Media School stairwell

Mat Whiteley, a masters student in his third year, works on a mural in the stairwell of Franklin Hall. Whiteley spent months working on his artwork, then printed it on giant stickers to put on the wall. 

Third-year Master of Fine Arts student in digital art Mat Whitley sat down with the IDS to discuss the new mural he produced in the northeast stairwell of Franklin Hall.

IDS: Could you tell me the process of how this mural came to be?

Whitley: One of the people that work here at the Media School, Jay (Director of Facilities and Technology Jay Kincaid), he saw one of my murals that was at the fine arts building I did. It was a small mural that I had made for the Mad Lab — I actually work there. The Mad Lab is a fabrication lab, and it has 3D printing, laser cutters, all that kind of stuff. So I made a mural for that, just a small one, and he came by and saw it and mentioned that there’s a lot of blank walls in the media building that maybe someone would be interested in having a mural put up. That kind of developed into talking to other people about putting stuff up, eventually talking to Beth (Associate Dean Betsi Grabe), the vice president here of the Media School. Kind of dealing with what kind of imagery we can do. I like considering the different departments and that kind of thing.

The last mural you worked on was in the fine arts building, so how did working on that mural and the things you put into that one effect the way you approached this one?

That one was my first one that I did using vinyl. This one is made of vinyl as well. I’m just using the vinyl cutter that’s in the Mad Lab. The one for the fine arts building is the first large scale one I’ve made using vinyl. I learned a lot as far as how to layer them correctly, how to go about printing them and cutting them and having overlap and stuff.

Is it challenging working with vinyl, as compared to other forms? I’m not even sure what the process would be.

The process was me drawing it by hand or with the computer through Illustrator, and then sending it to a vinyl cutter, which basically reads the lines of the drawing and cuts the vinyl based on those lines. It’s pretty amazing. I’m kind of just drawing with an Exacto knife but digitally. It’s been fun to mess around with because I’ve never done it before.

You kind of covered this already, but what inspired your artistic approach for this mural?

Other than the kind of content of what they wanted as far as the different departments, stylistically, it’s my usual style. It’s more of a friendly approach to it, I guess. Mine’s usually more obscure and gross, maybe, which is kind of just the way my style is. It kind of still has that, so that’s okay. It’s really graphic, the colors are really bright primary colors, so that’s typical of my work.

A lot of the images in the mural relate themselves to media.

They wanted me to tie in all these different departments. The pixelated person I made, that’s obviously the game design area, then there’s the camera. There’s actually an old, ‘60s tube TV. Betsi actually has one that’s in her office upstairs, it’s really cool, and I was like, “I should put that on the mural.” It’s just so funky looking and such a cool design. I liked it. Some of the other stuff is more just a romanticized media, this bunch of pipes and robotic looking things. I just tried to make this one kind of blob of all the different medias.

Why was this particular stairwell and level of the stairwell chosen?

Whitley: I’m not exactly sure. They mentioned it was a place that you have to go through, that stairwell, to get to a lot of different parts of this building. I’m not too confident about that myself because I get lost in here all the time. If that’s the case, then that’s the case. They had mentioned wanting to do more murals eventually— I’m not sure if me, or not, or other people — so I think multiple parts of the stairwell or other parts of the building might get more art in the future, which is cool.

Earlier you were saying because it’s an exterior facing wall, you were having problems with the vinyl sticking. What other kind of challenges did you face across the entire duration of this project?

That’s been really the main issue. I hadn’t run into that before, the cold being an issue at all, because every other time I’ve tried to stick a vinyl on a wall that’s very similar to that one, it’s worked fine, no problems at all. I tested that wall out in the fall when it was still kind of cold, not crazy cold like it is now, and it worked fine. So that was definitely an unexpected turn of events. I went and bought a hairdryer to try and help it out. It seems to be working okay.

What value does art, especially public art, have for a community like Bloomington and IU?

Art is a nice vehicle for a lot of different things. It communicates what people can’t put into words sometimes. Like, just this building. This building is so many different kinds of things. It’s a Media School, and media is continuously getting broader and broader of a term, so parts of my mural are kind of an abstraction of that. I think that’s what it is. It’s a constantly evolving thing. Art is able to communicate that when there might be a difficulty to communicate that otherwise. That’s why I like art in general. It allows me to communicate and express myself. If other people see it, then they might come to understand things better, or see things from a different perspective, like they hadn’t thought about things like that before. Or, it’s just something nice to look at. That’s cool too.

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