Deborah Chalfant

LAYERSCAPE

I am drawn to the media of video, holography, and sculpture to explore my world and manifest my conceptual ideas. I find myself investigating the boundaries of time and space and the layers between, and also how these real or perceived boundaries define who I am and limit me.

Video deals with the issue of time by capturing motion through space. By playing back a video I can recreate what has already occurred in real time. In video, perception is a timing device. Both video and holography are direct mediums through which to process and understand the bits of information that whirl by us on a daily basis.

Layerscape was an installation that consisted of a video projection onto and through three 45 by 88 inch canvas panels with progressively smaller square openings in their centers, and a second video playing on a monitor. Viewers could take seats on directors chairs facing the screens, or walk around and through them. To the right of a seated viewer, the monitor played footage taken from the passengers window of my car as I travelled the entire circumference of Columbus´ outerbelt, I-270, at 65mph. Facing forward, one was presented with a frontal view from the passengers seat, as I drove north on route 23 at 35 mph, from the southern to northern limits of the city.

The latter video bisected both the city and the circuitous route of the 270 video playing on the television monitor. The projection was visible on the front and back of the panels and dropped through each opening in the panels, finally playing onto a map of Columbus (with both video routes highlighted). The forward-moving video illustrates the changing layers of neighborhood landscapes as one moves from a distant boundary to the city core and back, a slice of our culture. The unusual, sideways-view on the monitor flashes by at a quicker, more dizzying speed, a more anonymous landscape with subtler changes, the outer layers of Columbus are revealed.

The city is a living breathing organism, beautiful, ugly, needy, giving, dirty, clean, safe, unsafe, growing, and unfinished.

Deborah Chalfant

chalfant.4@osu.edu