TAUBA AUERBACH: I would like people to think about themselves as a participant in the painting. 

NARRATOR: That’s the artist, Tauba Auerbach. 

AUERBACH: The way that you place yourself physically in relationship to it will determine how you see it. So your position in space is a part of the piece. 

NARRATOR: Let’s move away from the painting, all the way to the center of the room. 

SFX: Crumpling of paper 

AUERBACH: So I was crumpling paper in my studio, sort of as a gesture of randomness, and then lighting it from the side and taking photos, and then putting those photos on the computer and spending a lot of time adjusting the contrast and half-toning them in Photoshop.  

NARRATOR: When you see a photo in a newspaper or magazine, you’re actually looking at a halftone, which is made of dots. Your eyes do the work of smoothing out the tones. Auerbach plays with that effect. 

AUERBACH: So I printed the outlines of each— of each dot, and then filled the inside in with acrylic paint, by hand. When the painting was— was complete and it was eighty inches tall, it would have sort of a resolution distance where you would start to see the image at, say, thirty feet back or forty feet back. The contours in the image are just made by variation in the size of the dots. 

SFX: Music fades