Liza McConnell

IDEAL LANDSCAPE

This installation was in a dysfunctional darkroom adjacent to the exhibition gallery. The space had an 8' long metal sink visible from the doorway connecting it to the gallery. Time and functional realities had transformed the darkroom into a storage room/utility closet, filled with lights, paint, tripods, cinderblocks, sawhorses, hammers, nails, brushes, wires, hooks and all the tools and trappings necessary to maintain/decorate a gallery, studio, or a family home. The gallery director agreed that I could use this site to install a project for the Some Space Between exhibition. Many of the objects cluttering the site were incorporated into the installation, both out of practicality and to integrate the project with the function of the site.

From the gallery, the viewers could look through the open doorway to observe a 20" x 30" screen hanging freely above the sink, illuminated with the glowing image of a pastoral landscape. Positioned as though it had just been photographically processed in the sink and was hanging up to dry, the image was actually projected from a video projector above the doorway. Though the terrain and structures of the landscape image remained static, the atmosphere was in flux, changing from a soft mist to smoky, noisy eruptions.

Once inside the darkroom, the rest of the installation exposed how the image was actually created. A miniature stage set made provisionally from lights, wire, paper, string, and small tools was propped up on a set of sawhorses. It was configured in such a way as to cast the illusion of a vast landscape on a translucent screen. The screen was being recorded by a digital video camera on a tripod. The video camera was directly feeding an image-stream to the projector above the doorway. As changes occurred on the stage set, (from the operation of a bubble maker and a fog machine,) they were "simultaneously" projected on the screen above the sink.

All of the props, light sources, technology, and power cables were readily visible allowing the viewer to uncover the process of illusion. A shiny red button encouraged viewers to activate the fog machine while inside the darkroom, filling the dimly lit space with a light mist and creating an ambiguous atmospheric eruption in the projected landscape image.

Liza McConnell

liza_mcconnell@hotmail.com