Hurley and the artist James “Dalek” Marshall brought AOSA an exhibition to build. Over roughly two months we worked alongside Dalek to execute it in wood, vinyl and custom blacklit paper prints — an immersive environment fabricated in Huntington Beach, California.
The brief
Hurley brought us Prism Break, an exhibition by the artist James “Dalek” Marshall. The work was his. Our job was to make it exist at full scale.
That is a different brief from a booth. There is no spec sheet to work to and no licence to reinterpret — the artwork is the specification, and anything we changed to make fabrication easier would have been a change to the piece.
The collaboration
We worked directly with Dalek across about two months, translating his geometry into something that could be fabricated, shipped, installed and walked through.
His language is unforgiving to build: hard-edged repeating stripes, sharp gradients, forms that read as folded planes. A stripe that drifts across a joint is visible from the other side of the room, so the tolerance conversation and the artistic conversation were the same conversation.
The build
Three materials, three jobs.
Wood for the structures — the freestanding angular forms that turn a flat room into something you move between rather than look at.
Vinyl for the surfaces, carrying Dalek's striped geometry across walls and forms so a pattern runs continuously along a plane and around a corner without breaking.
Custom blacklit paper prints, made to read under UV so the environment changes character with the lighting rather than staying one fixed picture.
The result
Prism Break is an environment people walked into and stood inside — not a wall they looked at. The structures, the wrapped surfaces and the lighting do one job together, which is the only way that kind of piece works.
Hurley and Dalek came back for a second one. That collaboration became Psych Optic Black Light Fuzz.
“The artwork was Dalek's. Our job was to make it stand up, print true, and survive a crowd.”AOSA, on building an artist's work
Bring us the drawing. We will work out the wood, the print and the install — and tell you honestly what will and will not survive a crowd.
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