Stuck on the Bay Bridge: Approach, Transition, Touchdown at Electric Works

My friend’s car tracked slowly forward in the right lane of the Bay Bridge, nearly stopping, even as cars to our left flashed by at normal speeds. It was the fourth of July, and we had rolled happily into a spontaneous gathering of slow-by-choice drivers scanning the skies for fireworks. From our unlikely highway perch, we were able to see at least three different shows reflected into the bay. It was pretty cool. As I strained to see beyond the grey bulk of the Bay Bridge’s massive side beams, I thought of its structure as nothing more than an inconvenient barrier.

The Bay Bridge isn’t usually an object of admiration, even when it’s not blocking fireworks. It makes us think of rising tolls, red taillights and unexpected S-curves. Local artists Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather spent nearly a year researching the Bay Bridge before beginning the collaborative project Approach, Transition, Touchdown that became the series of artworks on display through November 23 at Electric Works.

Courtesy of the artists and Electric Works, San Francisco.

At first, they were overwhelmed by their research, which involved consulting architects, urban planners, engineers and endless stacks of drawings, maps and diagrams. The artists also delved into old construction photographs and visited the bridge by boat, finally surveying the construction of the new East Span from the dizzying heights of its semi-flexible tower.

In earlier collaborations, Hughen and Starkweather mapped layers of form and pattern created by traffic, water, airplanes, and trees, and it was easy to tell which artist had applied which pigments. But this time, they abandoned individual layers, choosing instead to work on the same surface. Their marks became less distinguishable, as if they had absorbed the intense duty of bridge architects and engineers to build one uniform structure that doesn’t reveal the identity of its individual creators.

Of course, Hughen and Starkweather weren’t building a structure capable of supporting thousands of tons. Instead, they were mapping, which is essentially a process of elimination. In earlier work, when Hughen and Starkweather tracked phenomena like water patterns and pedestrian routes, they made data meaningful by stripping away extra information to illuminate patterns we wouldn’t ordinarily notice. But because the Bay Bridge is an imposing part of our local landscape, we’re familiar with the patterns of its massive girders and trusses. In order to show us something new, Hughen and Starkweather eliminated whole sections of the bridge itself, as if certain structural elements were coffee shops on a map of hardware stores.

Courtesy of the artists and Electric Works, San Francisco.

They gracefully disassemble the visual of the bridge and fill the open space with compelling features of the bridge’s environment, building original forms in each new piece. Florescent bay waters drip slowly from abstracted beams, drawn to the bridge’s power but not beholden to it.

The historical element of the artists’ research means multiple time periods are collapsed into each work. Some of the forms in Original Bridge resemble scientific visualizations of wormholes — hypothetical shortcuts through space and time — suggesting that these works are maps through both dimensions. This line work proves the power of artistic selectivity, through which artists and mapmakers can represent entities of such different character and composition (a real bridge and a hypothetical wormhole) with such similar lines.

At the show’s opening, the project manager of the Bay Bridge retrofitting project slipped Hughen and Starkweather buttons that read “I Love the Bay Bridge.” Both artists say they’ve become big fans of the bridge and its workers. But the artists don’t pay homage just to the structure. Instead, they map a curious hybrid of bridge, bay, space and time that’s worth stopping the car for.

Approach, Transition, Touchdown: The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge Project runs through November 23, 2011 at Electric Works in San Francisco. For more information visit sfelectricworks.com.