A million things that make your head spin

Date: 2016-2017
Location: Customs House, Circular Quay, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Commissioning Agent: Art & About and the City of Sydney
Medium: flagging tape, wood, paint, and hardware
Size: 51.4 x 27.5 x 84.8 feet / 15.67 x 8.37 x 25.85 meters

One of Geckler’s largest installations to date, A million things that make your head spin , is a six-story hurricane of color. At the top, the flagging tape is attached in six unique layers to the hoisted and custom-fabricated structure at the gantry level above. Six colors of flagging tape swirl in concentric rectangular shapes, each layer rotating in the opposite direction of the one before. By using mathematical progressions between hues in tandem with each layer’s unique rotational offset, Geckler plays upon human optical perception that mixes six individual colors into a rainbow of gradients.

The artwork’s venue, Customs House, is a historic building in Sydney, NSW, Australia, and aims to engage the thousands of tourists brought to the site every day. Created out of Geckler’s signature medium of flagging tape, she takes it one step further to transform the medium’s capacity as a construction signage tool into a hyperbolic wayfinding symbol for the City of Sydney. Geckler worked with an architect who devised a proprietary vertically-integrated system that was designed to make the actual installation of her most complex artwork to date as straightforward as possible. The City of Sydney alongside with Geckler recruited volunteers via a community posting, and they were able to enter at all stages of the project to find an intuitive and easy to follow system of tasks to assist in the community project.

Watch a time-lapse video of the creation of this artwork below

Megan Geckler “A million things that make your head spin”, ©2017 from Megan Geckler on Vimeo.