RE: plexglass face mounting
On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Loris Medici wrote: It's the first time that I hear plexiglass (more correctly: polymethyl methacrylate - plexiglass is a registered trade name) isn't archival. AFAIK, it is the material used in intraocular lenses (my mother has this kind of lenses inside her eyes because of her cataract problem) and hard contact lenses. I absolutely don't think they would put a material that clouds / yellows with time inside our eyes - would you? Plexiglass and acrylic medium are essentially the same material and again AFAIK acrylic paint / medium is considered as being quite stable / achival (depending on pigment of course). Probably all this depends on quality / make / impurities... I personally see high quality plexiglass as an archival material. If I remember correctly, laboratory mice (or at least chimpanzies) have the same genes as "humans" except for about 5%... and I wouldn't expect the plastic used for contact lenses to be 100% identical to sheet plexi in any event. Not to mention the difference in time: We say "ars longa, vita brevis," because humans rarely use their contact lenses for more than, say 50 years. That would be young in the life of an artwork. I wonder also if the sheet plexi in question is "high quality." Is it so labelled? (The sheet plexi we nailed to the window of an old Dutch door for insulation purposes about 30 years ago is a wreck, but of course I don't recall it being labelled "high quality.") J.
|