I have projected photos of my cine frame paintings in the studio dark space. I thought I knew how they would look, but I was surprised at the new life they took on shown this way. The actual paintings are small and fragile, but I projected them using two projectors onto two walls so that each image almost filled its wall and met its mirror image at 90 degrees. Their colours were so much brighter this way, and the images so full of information at this size, that they became a rich sensual experience. This just doesn’t happen when I look at them in their normal size and light, although several have a particular emotional pull.
If I put photos of the projected image below with the original painting stuck to a window, perhaps something of this altered effect will be visible even on a computer screen:
The most successful projections were when the two slideshows ran together. This was a fiddly business, but here is a link to a video of the most successful projection. Click here.
Excitingly, the double projection revealed unexpected aspects of my work. The figures in some images became far more prominent. This was possibly because they were much bigger and therefore easier to notice, but it may well also have been because they acquired a relationship with their double on the facing wall.
This was really interesting. I’ve identified with Francis Alys while writing this blog because I have not wanted the figures in my images to acquire the baggage of identity rather like anonymity is important in Alys’ work. In the projections any figures have a relationship with their mirror images, which somehow gives them identity they lacked before. This is not simply due to repetition – I think it is because their new spatial relationship with their opposite is theatrical. They each become the other’s audience, like we are theirs when we see them in their paintings, or in this slideshow. This mirroring creates a lifelike tension between the figures in each image: they become ‘them and us’ to each other, and somehow this elementary positioning makes them separate characters in our minds as viewers.
Or at least that is what I see when I watch the slide show. I wonder whether this effect is there for other viewers?
Another lovely effect of viewing the images this way is that new shapes appear where the images meet, which gives them a new dimension altogether. In some a moth appears, in others a kind of monstrous spider! You can still see all the original images, but all the shapes give way to this new ‘creature’ because it is centrally placed in the slideshow, so any narrative the images convey on their own is completely hijacked by the experience of seeing them this way. I had really been taking my images too seriously. This effect should not have come as a surprise. After all, the projection was really just a giant recreation of two kaleidoscope slides, but it is a very long time since I had any contact with a kaleidoscope and it did surprise me.
The new experience of sensual size, colour and texture, as well as the theatricality given to their figures, and the dominating new shapes and creatures are all new effects given to my paintings by the projection. I find them all exciting and pleasing, and I think the reason for this is that they are effects that we experience on an almost physical animal level as human creatures.
