What does light remember?
6-channel video installation, with 6 digital prints (84”w x 72”h) and sound in the former synagogue in Slovakia. 2018. April 14-June 9, 2018, At Home Gallery, Šamorín, Slovakia
As a small child, looking at the stars, I wondered: if light from a star takes so long to get here, what does it remember of its journey? How is it changed by its travel? Where does light go, after it can no longer be seen? These are a child’s questions, but as is often the way with our earliest queries, they resonate at a deep level. For example, physicists are now stopping a light pulse in one part of space, and then reviving it in a different location – with its information (memory) intact.
This site-responsive exhibition at the At Home Gallery in the former Šamorín Synagogue explores metaphorical questions about the material nature of captured light in terms of its capacity to hold memories and illuminate erased landscapes. Light is physical material, while the play of light and shadows (cinema) creates an illusion of reality – and one can pass a hand right through it. The gallery is bright with natural light during the day. But instead of darkening the space for video projections, I worked with the existing, natural light as an essential component of the installation. By projecting video imagery into the daylight, the video was often only faintly visible, in the shadow areas, as the piece instead drew the viewer’s attention to the existing light and its material qualities.
This is an important project in a larger exploration, in which I have been pushing away from the traditional black box viewing experience by allowing the natural light in a space to interact with the projection. The daylight in this space formed a dialog with the six projections, inviting visitors to consider the build-up of information carried in the various light sources. I asked people to contemplate the ‘memory’ their presence, the projections, and the daylight itself was imprinting into the former synagogue – a place layered with poignant, overlapping histories. This work also creates tension by leveling the tacit hierarchy of where meaning resides in the experience – is it in the video projection or in the existing natural light?