Chroma Key Mass 2021
Chroma Key Mass. Pillsbury State Forest, Fairview Township, MN. 2021. Custom acrylic house paint over found rock. Appx. 9 ft. x 13 ft. x 8 ft. Low weight estimate: 16+ tons. Elevation 1350 ASL.
Chroma Key Mass is a found monumental stone painted with a custom chroma key green sitting on edge of a state forest and rural highway. The large-scale stone, unearthed during road past construction, becomes a land marker and social political statement, questioning notions of capitalism, media consumption, and land, forest, and ecological erasure. As a cultural exercise amid weathered elements, Chroma Key Mass asks, “Who gets to define painting?”
The chroma key green color is typically utilized by the media, television, and advertising industries to composite, or layer/separate, two or more streams of live photo or video, such as actors or moving foregrounds from standard studio set backgrounds or scenery. The task involves shooting a subject against the solid-color background and later removing it in post-production, and then replacing it with an overlay transparency. The subject is then placed in front of any new or digital background. This overlay/composite technique is analogous to the figure/ground relationship within formal painting.
With Driessen’s Chroma Key Mass, the natural stone becomes the removed object from the northern woods backdrop setting, and morphs into an alien-like glowing structure that interrogates our assumptions of color interpretation, photographic processes, and postmodern digital technology. Created with simple painting technique, the color mass questions traditional painting definitions, by becoming multiple forms of painting and interdisciplinary art at once: abstraction, plein air, landscape, color field, mural art, land art, earth art, public art, collaborative art, durational art, and roadside attraction. With its natural keying and organic overlay, devoid of digital postproduction, the Chroma Key Mass manifests its own locational identity, working as a disruptor to our media driven systems, while waiting for its next collaborative tagging.
Pete Driessen credits Mother Nature for her ecological support of this site-specific public art project.