3 to 1: Tony Feher, tape, windows, and grids

3 to 1 is a video series that presents three unique perspectives on one artwork from the San José Museum of Art's permanent collection. Watch as artists, curators, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, and more, provide their take on the creative moment. In this video, Rebecca Camacho from Rebecca Camacho Presents, SJMA curator Rory Padeken, and SJMA education program coordinator Radhika Tandon offer insight into Tony Feher's artistic practice, his use of blue painter’s tape, and the joy he found in everyday materials.

Rory Padeken
Hi, my name is Rory Padeken, and I am the curator at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Rebecca Camacho
My name is Rebecca Camacho. I'm the owner of Rebecca Camacho Presents.

Radhika Tandon
My name is Radhika Tandon. I'm the education program coordinator at the San Jose Museum of Art. Behind me and the work we're talking about today is an installation sculptural work by Tony Feher called Laying Between Green and Violet #2.

Padeken
Well, the work is comprised of blue painter's tape, four pieces of wood, four clamps, plexiglass and a workman's light. So all of these materials one can easily source from your local hardware store, maybe in the tool shed or garage, and they come together into this wonderful, elegant, sculptural installation that evokes many things at once.

Camacho
Tony was an art handler and studio assistant for other artists for many years at the beginning of his career, and through those practices, he encountered painter's tape all the time. And at some point in time using this utilitarian item, he discovered that when you put painter's tape on a window, it became translucent, and then if you layered the tape over itself again and again, it became opaque. And that was really the beginning of the thought process that led to what became an entire body of work of these blue tape windows.

Padeken
I love when you get up close that you see the different sizes of tape that was used and torn by Feher and applied to the plexiglass. And then you see how he carefully laid each tape strip to create these starburst patterns that appear periodically throughout the sculpture.

Tandon
He's known to use regular household objects in his artwork, and I think it really brings out the feeling you are in a museum where it's really high art and maybe it's inaccessible to people because they don't know the tools or the skills, and I think he bridges that gap.

Camacho
Tony was very interested in consumer products that bridged the line of philosophy and physics in the sense that in the natural world, there are no straight lines, and yet humans manufacture items for perfection and geometric scale all the time. So when I look at this piece, a lot of that comes to the surface, and there's this grid element, and then there's the tearing of the tape. And the way that the tension exists between those two elements was a real fundamental part of this body of work

Tandon
For kids I know art can seem like a really distant thing. It seems like you need a special skill to do it. And if you're breaking it down by material and not using something fancy like oil paints, I think they become more intrigued. They find themselves thinking they can do this work.

Camacho
To Tony the Blue Tape Window series was really a way of capturing and co-opting the architecture of a space. So it was about making it so that the viewer was not looking at an artwork that was on a wall, that they were actually within the artwork looking out. It was important to him to have the piece be leaning against the wall, to not have it be too precious, or to try and make it look like he was creating an architecture for it that didn't exist. He wanted the framework to be very obvious and very apparent.

Padeken
When you look at the piece and stay with the piece, you see how much joy the artist might have had in creating it. Taking something like blue painter's tape, which I see it used in a completely different way, but also this very thoughtful process by the artist that went into creating the patterns that you see.

Camacho
Tony really loved beauty, and he liked putting beauty out into the world, and he liked making work that elicited a visceral response. And I think that he did it in a quiet way and yet a very powerful way.

Tandon
I think he would hope people are inspired by this work to maybe make their own interpretations of it. The accessibility of this piece is really intriguing to some people. Not knowing that it's painter's tape, you might think it's some fancy art material, but coming closer and taking a better look at it will give you a new perspective on the piece.

Tony Feher, “Laying Between Green and Violet #2,” 2015. Blue painter’s tape on UV Plexiglas, wood with bar clamps, and clamp lights; 96 x 53 ½ inches. Gift of the Estate of Tony Feher. 2019.11.01. © Tony Feher.

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