Filling space with images
Review:
Photography
lan de Gruchy: Camera 2, Projecting Space
Centre for Contemporary Photography;
October 5-November 4
By
ANNE MARSH
AS SPECTATORS walk into the gallery, they are
transformed into participants. Bodies moving in and around the environment
alter the visual landscape.
The
floor is awash with images. Skewed grids are disorienting as they dissolve
before the eyes, changing into golden rock and shattered glass.
The
installation, one of three by projection artist Ian de Gruchy, provides
an opportunity to experience the projected environment.
Most
of de Gruchy's projections have been on an architectural scale - transforming
the facades of city buildings, museums and libraries - or visual environments
created for performance works.
Projecting
the Floor uses 12 projectors to create a theatrical space. But in many
respects the space is meditative because the time sequencing is slow.
De
Gruchy's work has rarely been seen inside the gallery. Most of it can
be described as public art, in that it is in urban spaces, where people
just come across it or it is an element of a theatrical production.
This
exhibition includes Documentation Piece,
which covers work from New York, in 1984, to the most recent architectural
transformations.
In
June, de Gruchy projected musical instruments and scores on to the Queensland
Performing Arts Theatre, changing it into a lyrical photographic collage
for the Biennial.
For
the Adelaide Festival in 1988, he transformed the Festival Centre into
a humpy and his Library Projection (State Library of Victoria, 1992)
converted the side of the building into a bookshelf by scaling-up a
photograph taken in the reading room.
All
the projections are ephemeral events: some are lyrical, poetic or funny,
others are subversive.
The
Adelaide Festival humpy, for example, changed the architectural space
for high art into a monumental shack. It was a reminder that the Festival
Centre was built over a site of Aboriginal settlement.
City
Wall Projection last year used the State Bank Building in Swanston Walk
as a subversive billboard. The silhouette of a tree loomed high in the
cement jungle, a shadow of another place outside the urban hustle and
bustle.
The
architectural projections are spectacular and, like-the performance
works, exploit the magical qualities of photography.
Works
with Peter King and Jude Walton have used the illusionistic qualities
of multiple slide projections, with images refracted through water and
mirrors.
SURFACES
glide in and out of one another, creating a fluid progression and an
architectural interior from images and light.
In
the small loading bay behind the gallery, de Gruchy creates one of these
photographic illusions. The area is black, except for the projected
photographs. Titled Defying Gravity, the rocks in the room appear suspended
in space: weightless bodies or hallucinations which cannot be believed.
Camera
2: Projecting Space is an unconventional exhibition. Photographs are
a means to an end, constructing environments and transforming city skylines.