S&H Rubber and Primetech Silicones partner with artist for project

SAN MARINO, Calif.—When artist Diane Severin Nguyen approached Mike Bremer, business development manager at S&H Rubber, about participating in an art installation, he jumped at the chance.

"It was a unique opportunity to get to work outside of our normal realm of gaskets and washers and things like that. I've been working in rubber for 40 years and it's a lot of industrial-commercial kind of stuff," Bremer said. "So it was a nice opportunity to do something a little different."

He also was interested in learning about Nguyen's creative process.

"Trying to understand exactly what she wanted to do wasn't easy in the beginning," Bremer added. "I didn't really have her vision, but by the end of it, I did."

The finished project is called "Summer Cuts" and is a "large-scale intervention" installed alongside the windows in the Scott Galleries loggia at The Huntington Library in San Marino.

While the installation closed because of COVID-19, it reopened to the public on April 17.

According to the artist's representation, the large red curtain is slit, sliced and cut in a manner that resembles Nguyen's process of making images. The material is a metaphor for the technical process of photography itself, as it filters the natural light from outside and imprints textures onto the interior galleries.

To achieve this, Nguyen partnered with industry experts, exactly where S&H Rubber and Primetech Silicones came in. After agreeing to do it, Bremer said he met with the artist about what she wanted to accomplish. S&H made a few samples for her and then went to Primetech Silicones and met with Salvador Avalos.

"(Avalos) was readily available and we spent some time there on the mill putting the material in, changing the color from dark to light—even adding some sparkles to it at some point," Bremer said. "(We were) just trying to give the artist an idea of how the material would look when it was finished. We molded test slabs so she could get a visual on the color before we extruded the material."

The goal was to get the right shade of a translucent red that Nguyen was seeking.

"Once we got that, we went into production here to extrude the strips," Bremer said. "Then she did the final installation. She put the strips all together and then people at the museum actually hung the strips from there."

The material production took a little longer than a month, he said, with a few weeks to run the material and find the color, and then another couple weeks to pack and clean the material.

This marked the first time Bremer had participated in an art project like this. Typically, the privately owned company, which has been in business since 1967, makes rubber molding and extrusion for the aircraft and commercial industries. S&H is a small company with about 30 employees, but they are versatile in what they do.

While the art installation was the first of its kind for the company, it's not the first time they have partnered on a project in the entertainment space.

"I think the last thing that I did in that way was with a different company and we made a rubber backdrop for the group Nine Inch Nails. ... It was just a bunch of black rubber tied together," Bremer said.

Click here for more information about the exhibit.