Intersection
Installation, 2006
Steel, acrylic, plywood, 2 x dvd projections (looped)
Performer: Natasha Mrdalj
Metalwork: Michael Sanders
The work comprises a metal structure 323 cm high, 83 cm wide and 471 cm long. Two films are back-projected onto acrylic screens that enclose the object at either end, the framed construction housing the mechanisms of projection. The looped films record a woman walking through the space, filmed from either end. The woman appears, and disappears, just as she enters and departs the raised corridor space, her presence contrasted with long periods where the projections appear as still images. The orthogonals of the structure form a kind of ‘perspective box’. Projected and spatial realities are thus duplicated, in that a filmic space is overlaid onto its originating object. The projected images are cropped to the precise proportions of the acrylic screens, the vanishing points corresponding to an eye height of 161.5 cm.
The installation thus suggests two implicit viewpoints, correlating to the original camera positions. From here, reality and projected reality overlap. But this doubling-up is contradicted by the multiplicity of other possible viewpoints a spectator adopts towards the sculptural object. From oblique viewpoints, the two-dimensional reality of the screens is juxtaposed with the ‘real’ space behind. While evidently flat, the viewer tries to spatially resolve the projected space that now detaches itself from the three-dimensional space behind. The implied filmic space compresses in relation to the three-dimensional reality of the containing metal structure.