Artist Statement - Inspiration

Victor Stoichita's wonderful book, A Short History of the Shadow outlines different relationships to shadows in Art; the shadow as a metaphor for being (Plato); the birth of representation and painting (Butades' daughter); the mysterious expression of the self (Shadowgrammes) and, most importantly, the expression of a hidden monstrosity or otherness.

 

As an interface, shadows are a very intuitive device - one that is expressive and that has a vast vocabulary of interaction, thanks to both the personal experience that everyone has with their shadow and the sophisticated shadow puppet traditions that are found in most cultures.

 

I have used shadows as an interface in many previous installations. The most similar project to Under Scan was Body Movies (commissioned for European Cultural Capital in Rotterdam in 2001), although there are some key distinctions to be made. In Body Movies the portrait is a ‘field’ that is matched and animated by the shadows of individuals, in a game of mimicry and representation that I call ‘reverse-puppetry’. In Under Scan the video portraits have the opposite effect; they take over the shadow and look out at the public. The intention is to attain what Brecht called "noticing of the knots": the moment of complicity between ‘the representation’ and reality.

 

In our age of surveillance, globalization, and urban homogenization, I believe there is the need to re-link people to their surroundings. The work of painters such as Parmigianino, Velázquez and, more recently, Leon Golub and Attila Luckacs show scenes where vectors of glances precisely pin the viewer in complicity with what is being seen; who is the viewer? Who is the subject in these works? These are pertinent questions as we deal with the disappearance of public space. Video-portraits as seen in Gary Hill's installation Tall Ships or in the work of pioneering media artists such as Luc Courchesne, Lynn Hershmann and Paul Sermon take these questions to the next level of intimacy.