Gnomon

Last night I created my next projection negation piece, an installation called Gnomon, which will be present in my final MFA critique ever next week! With what I had learned in the install for UnKnowledge, I was able to streamline my process enough to do what took me about a month's worth of Thursdays and Fridays at the Walsh Gallery in only one (very long) day! This bodes well for my upcoming thesis show install at Magnan Metz, for which I have only 3 days of install time to making more painting disappear.

studio panorama: projecting the image, masking it off to paint on the wall, then calibrating the projected colors.

Gnomon takes the optical negation one step further than UnKnowledge did, projecting into a mirror at the opposite end of the installation.

projecting into the mirror

The name of the piece tells the story of its inspiration: A gnomon is the vertical part of a sundial that casts the shadow. In ancient Greek however, the word gnomon means "one that discerns" or "that which reveals." A shadow caster that discerns and reveals... seems very Heideggerian! I thought it was a perfect starting point for the projection negation project in which your shadow, in obstructing the beam of the projector, actually reveals the painting underneath.

Additionally, because of the shape of a sundial's gnomon, Euclid began using the word gnomon to mean the subtraction of a parallelogram from a larger, similar parallelogram, resulting in a fracturing/fragmenting of form. This was the basis for my imagery, beginning with a square and gnomonizing it until it becomes a fractured, multiplicitous design reminiscent of some of the mandala imagery I've been using.

the "gnomonized" square image

The fractured multiplicity within the image then reinforced in the viewer's shadow. The projected image is reflected off of a mirror on its way to the wall, creating multiple beams for the viewer's body to obstruct, resulting in two viewer shadows of differing sizes. The image itself is then also multiplied and fractured yet again by showing up on the wall, in the mirror, and on the surface of the mirror itself.  

Ultimately I see this installation as a prototype for something bigger and far more disorienting, using many mirrors. But I had to start somewhere :-)