I’ve already considered and rejected projecting a kind of floating show of my animations onto smoke. It would be too difficult to create enough of a dense body of smoke for long enough to show a projected image, and doing so in compliance with indoor health and safety regulations was definitely beyond me. But online I had seen someone projecting a floating ‘hologram’ from an iPhone, which looked charming, and safe, so I had a go. It did not work, nor did it work in the dark, nor did my attempts to film it. I re-read the instructions, and realised this process is intended to enable you to ‘project’ specially designed hologram images downloaded from the Apple site. What a shame.
I remembered recently I never checked how my big soft pastel would hang, and what backing would suit it. With a bit of help (thanks Sarah Bale and Robin Warnes!), I attached it to one of my studio space roller blinds and was able to see it with light behind:
The light behind somehow reduces the warmer pigments and as I lay the picture on the floor, it looks much richer, and more sensual and animated. It seems that it needs light to bounce off its surface, not pass through its surface, for the pigments to work. If I use it in my show, this one needs to be ON a white surface, no need to construct a light source behind it.
This month I was in Norway to visit my son and made a special trip to see HEX, The Master Exhibition 2016 at Bergen Kunsthall showing works by final year Master in Fine Art students of Bergen Academy of Art and Design. This group show cunningly made its spaces do more by lighting some for alternate hours, so projections and other work could share spaces. Fortunately I visited during a projection hour and saw two interesting pieces. One was projected from above onto an installation of irregular pieces of plywood. Although this was an exciting new way to project, it was very difficult to see the film it showed, and seemed to me to be mostly concerned with the difficulty of seeing and the intrusion of physical surfaces and limits of seeing. I want my viewer to feel something of the naturalness and inevitability of the mind’s action on my images, so this won’t do for me.
I loved another projected piece, and was very taken with its confident use of its own big white room, with speakers and seating:
This is a beautifully crafted art house film, with complicated plot, screen and sound edits, and it ran for 24 minutes, so its commanding staging seemed appropriate. I’m worried my own reanimated images do not have the elegance and substance to be given their own solo space like this, although I can’t forget the wonderful James Coleman projections I saw in London which did fill, and dazzle, their grand venue.
Back at UCS in my degree show space I practice playing my unfinished projection in different ways, hoping to establish whether it works better as a solo exhibit, or as a piece of a show of several sorts of my work. First I went big:
This needs to be in a darker space to look really vivid, and I’d need to hang the projector out of the way somehow.
Then I went small:
The big picture frame in this film represents a new wall that I would need to build to make a small film work in this space. It would then be showing in a kind of tunnel. I took a small poll of students who were working nearby, and there was general agreement that the small scale projection is much more vibrant and colourful, even with the amount of light currently in the space. I agree.
DILEMMA!
I need to decide how many pieces of work to show. If I go ahead and screen my projection small in its new ‘tunnel’, there will be several ‘new’ wall spaces, in the other area this creates which could have work on them, or stay blank. This might create a heightened sense of theatre when you leave the blank space to see the films in my ‘tunnel’ – but it could seem strangely empty. We don’t have long to decide on our degree show build – the technicians will be starting soon. After some hard thinking, I resolve to add the new wall. My animations look best on that scale. When the space has its new tunnel I shall have to experiment with different pieces on the other walls, and come to a decision about how my work communicates best. Do I just show the animations, or other work as well?
