By Dave Lewandowski
indy500.com
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Calame, in the first trimester of pregnancy, spent a week late last autumn at the historic racetrack – most of the time "on my belly" – to capture skid marks, fuel stains and gouges to implement in the body of work "Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway" at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The exhibit, through March 16, 2008, of 11 drawing and seven paintings is a contemporary visual testimony to the drama and pathos of "The Greatest Spectacle in Racing." The pretzel-shaped enamel and latex expression of Wheldon's celebration that greets gallery guests is the largest and most dramatic (20 feet high by 76 feet wide) of the collection.
"I've traced marks in the world, but I never know who made them," Calame said. "So this was special to know the history. I think it's a different drama than Dan Wheldon might expect. It's so slow what I do compared to the drama of what made the mark.
"It was really important for me to do (the large piece) so that you got the sense of the scale and drama because the paintings and the drawings are so labor-intensive and accurate to the marks but they are so overlaid that you wouldn't necessarily get a sense of the drama of one mark.
"This is important to me to pull a thread from the weave of my work and share it so others can get a sense of the scale. I finished it days before my daughter was born. It was my big hurrah."
The museum suggested a site-specific commission to Calame, whose bold compositions have encompassed street graffiti and stains on the concrete embankment of the Los Angeles River near her studio. When Speedway superintendent Dan Edwards escorted her on an initial tour of the racing ribbon, life was breathed into the project.
"I was totally blown away by the scale," Calame said. "I immediately got on the phone with my assistant and said, 'Please ship some more Mylar.' Even the skid marks on pit lane were 50 feet long. I had been tracing on the L.A. River, which also has a wide expanse. It's more like big graffiti. That had a big scale, but not the kind of trajectory that the Speedway has."
Edwards could associate a date and driver with each tire mark, and the Speedway quickly became Calame's canvas with multiple stories.
"Dan's marks are still there," Edwards said of Wheldon's 2005 doughnut. "We hear unusual requests (to use the facility), and that was definitely one of them. It's was intriguing once they got started. It ended up being a lot of fun. They worked very hard."
Calame and a team of 12 often laid several rolls of 300-feet-long and 5-foot-wide Mylar side by side to capture marks on the track's diamond-ground asphalt surface. Back at her studio, Calame overlaid the collective tracings and transferred them onto clean sheets of Mylar. Pencil drawings and enamel-on-aluminum paintings were derived over the past year.
"The drawings and paintings are 1 to 1-scale excerpts, so even the victory doughnut you see most of it on the wall but only a corner of it in the painting," Calame said. "The scale of the mark doesn't affect how much of it you see, but the scale of the mark did affect how large I wanted to work.
"I'm thrilled; I think it's a beautiful show. I'm really pleased with the incorporation of the Speedway. I think the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Speedway are both incredible resources and institutions. The Speedway is really a phenomenal spectacle; architecturally beautiful from the diamond cut and the perfection of the cleaning. It's incredible to join the two resources together.
"It's interesting to do a project and show it in the same town. The people who have helped me make it happen can now see it."
Wheldon, the first Indianapolis 500 winner to do doughnuts, will visit the gallery the next time he's in town.
"A significant amount of history went into Ingrid's pieces," he said. "I was extremely emotional after winning the event. I had tears. I thought: 'I cannot drive into Victory Lane crying. I'm a man.' So I started doing the doughnuts."
Now they're an indelible story in the Speedway's history.
***
2008 Indianapolis 500 tickets: For information about tickets for the 92nd Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, May 25, 2008, visit www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com or call the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Ticket Office at (800) 822-INDY outside the Indianapolis area or (317) 492-6700 locally.
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