TIDELINES
Within the hush of a long, narrow chamber the steady yet abstracted flow of a human crowd is coupled with the dizzyingly large yet graceful pulse of moon jellyfish. As one’s feet drag across and through a ground of sand, the participant is drawn in by what appears evocative and dreamy yet they are also disoriented by the enigmatic space, reflective surfaces and the repetition of ambiguous imagery. A perceptively confusing experience, the installation also presents an alluring yet oblique complicity inherent in the relentless flow of humankind linked to the ever-increasing proliferation of jellyfish blooms resulting from changes to our natural environment, thus referencing and evoking the dramatic shifts and transitions rendered in the ongoing evolutionary process.
Tidelines is an immersive, site-responsive installation, in which I use large-scale projections to engage participants in waves of rhythm and motion that contrast and also connect seemingly disparate organic life forms. Responding to the theme of ‘Transitions’ at IngenuityFest in Cleveland, the intent is to invite questions amid confusing pleasure that prompt reflection upon one’s own state of being in the world and within the larger, encompassing, fluid sense of time.
As James Gleick prefaces in Chaos: the making of a New Science, “The first chaos theorists had and eye for pattern, especially pattern that appeared on different scales at the same time”. I liken shared rhythms and pulses of variant life-forces as being a version of this patterning and a metaphoric reminder of the ever-shifting, constantly transitioning yet connective process in the world around us.
This iteration of Tidelines was developed to respond to the space provided by Ingenuity Fest, which was an 8’ x 20’ x 8’ shipping container, one of a cluster comprising a group of installation galleries, adjacent to the shores of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland. This exhibition was in October, 2015, and presented an exciting opportunity to show site-responsive work publicly for the first time outside of Canada, along with approximately 100 fellow artists from across North America and beyond.
8’ x 20’ x 8’ shipping container, beach sand, jersey projection screen, plexi mirrors, wood, earth magnets, projectors, speakers, single channel video loops, single channel sound loop.
