Connie Mallinson and I applied for some Metro public art contracts. I didn’t get one but she got the final showdown between three other artists. She started on it but the images she wanted to use were way to complicated to get done by the deadline. I had shown her a couple of images I was goofing around with that placed some of her walk-trash; photoshopped to look like bronze and stuck to a random garage wall. She was like: “WTF is this”. So anyway, she was struggling with the proposal because it was hard and she was also otherwise busy and she usually works by herself. She asked me what to do so I said don’t worry I’ll take your walk trash and make a couple of photo collages so you can win; those were nothing but sand and office party. She won and then it was like: now what are you gonna do? We decided that we would do more photo collages. Metro had very vague guidelines, not even dimension at first. They were all–”we want to see how creative you are”. Except it had to be about Santa Monica or Metro, 300dpi (I think they meant ppi), jpg and it was going to be printed on metal. I started masking around probably a thousand or more of her walk-trash objects and flowers, birds (that she painted) trees, bushes, houses, buildings, airplanes, surfers, beach toys, furniture, people, bikes, surfboards, dogs, artwork, fruit and veggies, roller-coasters, skies, clouds, gallbladders, Ferris-wheels, big red cars, etc. . I would put some things together and she would come over and she would sit there and we would decide what went in or out and, the stuff was arranged and general theme. She always had great ideas and sometimes I did, sometimes we would go wow and other times we would argue about what it should look like. She would usually win. The deadline was short and I pretty much busted ass and finished on time. Kind of a bummer was that when the contractor sent the color samples for some reason metro wouldn’t let me see them because I wasn’t on the contract? (That’s why the reds all run together on some of them, but anyway.) We’re still friends.

all images are copyright constance mallinson/ARSNew York