Prompt 2

Something I really liked in a couple of the galleries we visited was the presence of skylights. Something that I started thinking about when I was looking at the different use/amount of light in the various galleries was how an exhibit could possibly be made using the light of the gallery. My proposal might not be entirely physically possible, but I'm gonna DREAM BIG like the prompt told me to.

If I could make any exhibit, I'd like to use a skylight to project light through photographic emulsions or slides to project the images on the sides of the gallery. I'm not sure if any of the galleries we visited had a skylight quite big enough for what I am imagining, but with enough lenses anything is possible - right (maybe a giant magnifying glass on the roof)? I'd like to take a domed skylight and arrange the slides in an arc from East to West along the path of the sun. Each slide would be fitted with it's own focusing lens, and would project the image in a different area of the gallery, although slightly overlapping. The gallery would have little to no artificial light source, to allow the images to show up more clearly. A fixture around the upper half of the gallery space would provide a surface on which to project the images, to give them a space closer to the slide, which would allow for a brighter image with the same amount of light. The rest of the gallery space would be completely bare, and ideally have a relatively light absorbent surface, so that the only real light would be either leaking from the skylight, or the projected images themselves.

As the sun traversed its East to West arc during the day, the brightest images would slowly change, playing a continuously changing slideshow in which the images slowly flowed from one to another. The overlapping projections, along with the more diffused light source of the sun, would make the images blend into each other a little, and no single image would ever be shown at a time, but rather a clear progression in which one or more images on either side of the brightest would still be dimly visible. The full exhibit would thus never be visible at any one given time, and it would take the full day for all of the images to display. There would be no artificial illumination for the slides, so as the sun set, the images would fade, and it would not be viewable pre-dawn or post-dusk.

The artist who's work I would like to display in this fashion is Robert Capa. I think it would be interesting to compile a small collection of his photographs from various conflicts from the many wars and conflicts he documented. The photographs would be displayed according to the geographic location of the war from which they were taken, so that when the sun is in the East, the brightest photograph would be from, say, the Second Sino-Japanese war, and when the sun set in the West, it might set on images from Normandy. Something about the idea of the images he took from around the world being illuminated by the rotation of the Earth itself really draws me. And I also like the idea of the conflicts merging together, rather than being displayed in different exhibits, or even in discretely and seperately placed images in the same exhibit. I think giving light and voice to these conflicts, and to the medium of photography which literally translates to 'light writing' (photos graphos) by using the natural trajectory of the sun highlights the medium used, and the cyclic, inevitable nature of conflict in our species. It also can emphasis that conflicts everywhere are similar in many ways. I don't think that the imagery is particularly complex, but I think that also makes it more easily digestible and accessible.