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Another Big Frieze For Summit
For the fourth year running, Summit Steel has been involved in rigging London’s high profile and popular Frieze Arts Fair, staged in Regents Park, and featuring over 160 galleries of the world’s most exciting contemporary art.
Working for organisers Frieze Events, the Summit team of up to eigtht riggers led by Jay Call suspended over seven kilometres of steel wire rope in the ceilings of the four main tented venues. This consisted of catenary wires at two different heights, a lower one to accommodate the false ceiling and a higher one for suspending heating and air conditioning ducts and other elements of plant.
They did the same in six additional subsidiary tents – all supplied by Owen Brown. The work was completed over a two-week period, with Summit going in after the construction of each of the tents was completed. The largest tent measured 200 metres long by 40 wide. Another was 150 by 50, and the smaller ones were sized 24 by 50, 32 by 65 metres and similar.
Summit also installed trussing strictures to facilitate the rigging of lighting and projection equipment into the auditorium tent. This consisted of a large H-frame of 30.5cm Thomas Supertruss trussing. In the Education tent, the team installed a run of trussing along the tent’s central spine – used to hang a projector and lights.
Across in the Deutsche Bank Lounge – a principal event sponsor – Summit worked with set builders MDM to suspend a large wooden false ceiling made from criss-crossing slats of timber.
In the Education and VIP tents, Summit installed drop wires, so the false ceiling dressing could be styled into ‘tented’ effects rather than left as a flat surface as it was elsewhere.
Another major section of their work was the provision of suspension points and drop lines in 5 of the major galleries – the 303 Gallery, Greengrassi, Marianne Boesky, Barbel Graslin and Lehmann Maupin – which were used to suspend and rig assorted different artworks.
The biggest challenge, says Call, was twofold. Firstly sometimes having only very short timeslots allotted for their specific elements of the work to be completed in the various areas. Secondly, the stands weren’t marked out until after the rigging, so they had to harness their best powers of perspicacity, judgement and common sense to try and get the rigging accurately placed for what was going to fill the space, which also entailed a massive amount of liaising with the galleries.
Jay Call says, “As always, it has been a huge pleasure to work with true professionals who, when faced with operational challenges like delays, focus on solutions and careful compromise.”
24th October 2006
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