I am Sitting in a Room with Light, 2024, video installation (left) and live camera projection (right), an invited installation for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Visiting Artist Program with Kimsooja and Jaeho Chung
video installation at 3:23
video installation at 14:32
live camera viewing exit sign
layered live camera feed
installation view with active videos, 51 second clip from 23 minute video
Introduction during event
I was thinking of recreating a work of mine from 2019 when Mary Jane Jacobs reached out asking if I could contribute an installation to the student discussion event with Kimsooja and Jaeho Chung. The piece from 2019 was an endeavor to reproduce Alvin Lucier’s work “I am sitting in a room” with light rather than sound. It felt like a fitting situation to provide as company to a conversation with Kimsooja and Jaeho Chung, as we would sit together in a room in the performance department, a room meant to control light.
When I came to the room, I sat in the dark and came to appreciate the light from these exit signs, a light that is out of our control in this room and what has been the bane of many of our existences performing in this space over the years. I thought about how the presence of this light was in anticipation of other things we could not control.
I decided to work with the exit sign as my subject, filming the light by standing on a table with a tripod, this is the shutter you see in the film as I step on and off the table. I projected the video onto this wall and recorded the projection, then reprojected the new recording, over and over until the text became unreadable and the hard lines of the shape were erased and something new opened up.
I paired this work with another approach in my practice, making paintings that occur via the interplay between live camera feeds and light and objects in a room , live cameras used like viewfinders and paintbrushes , layered to make the light feel liquid, foregrounding situations that produce images as a counter balance to the onslaught of digital images we process every day without access to their physical origins.
Live cameras in spaces are also in a state of anticipation like the exit signs, repuposed in this condition to paint with light, to make an image plane that is permeable and fragile, liable to change and collapse, and I feel that in the quivering. An instability rendered again in the shuttering in the first video as the ground shook beneath the camera tripod.
I thought about the audienceship of these pieces of the room, the exit signs now in the spotlight, the table of spray bottles who have been in the corner watching everything now given a front seat, the color of their liquid somehow matching the colors that the cameras read in the exit signs.