Spill

Overview

Illumination Rig starts with a basic premise, turning money into light; it is in this sense an event, an occasion where consumption and transformation are made conspicuous. But the piece works in other ways: the lights used are very specific, they are film lights, they have a particular architecture and quality and they bring about the sense that something is about to unfold within their throw; they imply some kind of narrative, something about to arrive or depart, something extraordinary. They turn whatever they illuminate into a possible film set and they are a way of orchestrating movement and architecture. They also light the audience, they become the subject in a fictional landscape. The nuance of the piece changes dramatically according to its location and the conditions around it.

Spill uses a cinematic device, or effect, in order to deal with notions of threshold, appearance and threat. It situates itself in a tradition of painting in the way it uses fog to evoke a feeling of the uncanny and the sublime, also referencing Horror and Science Fiction films of the 1950’s and contemporary commercial music videos. Fog and mist were, and still are, used in Hollywood productions to designate a shift in aspect - a movement from the natural to the supernatural. I am interested in the way the dry ice both obscures and reveals in the way it is used, in one sense it is simply a process that we watch unfold but it also draws a screen over the present and visible and drops the viewer into a realm of suspense where things are semi-visible and shrouded. It is a hypnotic process yet threatening, acting a little like a narcotic.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.