I had a drawing professor in my undergrad who was always going on about “addressing the edges” whenever we made work on panel or canvas. It was of utmost importance to him that the decisions about the edges of a panel or canvas were made with full intentionality. If it was a work on paper, the paper should be displayed with equal intentionality, either framed behind glass or mounted to a panel (whose edges inevitably also needed to be addressed). Since that time, I have developed the attitude of considering the raw wood edge of a cradled panel to have the same finished effect as a frame. It’s a nothing decision, in which I hope pushes the edge to disappear from view, letting the work on the front surface of the panel stand without competition.
You see, while I get the premise behind this professor’s push for intentionality of the edge, I have grown to see this task as more akin to editing in filmmaking. I remember reading once that good editing is editing that goes unnoticed (for the most part, there are of course exceptions to this rule). When editing is noticed in a film, it is noticed because it is awkward or disjointed, often distracting from the film itself. The edge of a panel or canvas is the same for me. It can certainly be used to add or push the concept of the painting, but oftentimes these decisions are left to distract from the work on the front surface.
I found myself questioning this attitude all over again while producing a body of work for a recent exhibition. This body of work is focused on repeating a single surface in a variety of mediums, seeking to learn about the success and failure of a medium to recreate a particular surface. For this series, I recreated the same piece of oriented strand board (OSB) in ten mediums.
When producing these works, I found myself in a mental debate about how to address the edges. I always intended to mount the works to a panel the same depth as the original OSB. This decision, I found, caused me to debate whether or not these were 2D or 3D objects. Because of the mediums I chose (drawing, photography, video, text, etc.), I had always considered them to be two-dimensional. When viewing the original OSB from the front, it can appear to be 2D, but of course this isn’t reality. The board has depth, 1/2 inches of depth, in fact. By deciding to mount the works on paper to 1/2 inch panels, I in turn made those 3D objects as well.
I thought about drawing/photographing/printing/filming the edges of the original onto each panel, but that came with its own challenges (albeit interesting challenges with even more interesting implications). I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed with those ideas. I decided instead that it would be interesting to paint all the edges to match the original, which I remembered having one side painted red, while the other three were raw OSB.
I pulled out the original board to mix up the paint needed, the orangy-yellow of the OSB and the red painted edge, only to discover that the board I was working from didn’t have a red edge at all. All four were raw OSB. This no longer seemed interesting to me.
So I fell back into my old attitude of making the edge disappear, forcing these to be considered 2D rather than 3D objects. I still question if that was the right choice. But if I’m honest, time was against me and painting all edges white was the quickest (and I admit, laziest) solution.