Embossed paper construction, light, audio.
3.2 x 4.3 x 2.5m approx.
shown at Canary Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand.
September 2004
This installation sought to take the ephemeral atmospheric condition of a white out and to articulate its spatiality via the discipline of architecture. Its seemingly limitless condition becomes a failed geodesic construction, crystalline in appearance.
In a white out, the entire visual field is overwhelmed by whiteness via a process of light/information being diffused through each particle of water vapour. This denies a perspectival understanding of space and flattens depth-perception to an all-over field. Diffusion creates an over-presencing of information and a seeming blankness, yet one full of encoded meaning. The blankness of the white-out, threatening in the natural environment, in the gallery context becomes a space of potential where the magical and meditative can exist.
The overwhelming quantity of coded information and a concern for non-visual modes of navigation introduced the subtle manipulation of surface through repeated embossings of axonometric details taken from the site. A real-time sound piece took noises from in and around the gallery and manipulated them into an aural field of site specific textural “noise”.
