Breathing Underwater, 2009floorcloth installation, variable size, painting/drawing, canvas, image transfer, acrylic paint, marker, chalk

swipe/drag image

Breathing Underwater was the environment created to house the larger project of Finding TrackHouse and Psychedelic Chick. It was created as an installation at the Red Head Gallery, and augmented the exhibition of a hybrid reality relational piece that took place in Second Life.


The floorcloths of the Breathing Underwater installation are an extension of textile design. The floorcloth tidal-waves out the doors of the gallery and seduces visitors in to float above lyrical images and texts, facets of the street outside throughout Spadina’s markets. The visitor orients their journey through the water tides. The gallery walls are left white and provoke visitors’ imaginations to project upon the surface and beyond; and emulate an ethereal cyberspace. It is fantastical and enchanting, yet composed of found materials, images, and tokens of exchange that resonate from our daily journeys and what is often discarded: takeout bags, newspapers, and price stubs. The visual idioms are appropriated into a rushing collage of seemingly free thoughts and exotic norms. Experiencing the journey relates to web-based experience, in that one chooses which icons to click and pages to crawl. Visitors float around the gallery as they would in cyber-scapes, and choose if and when to bend down to focus in on details like the saturated purples and blues of lily pads, delicate tie-dyed dragonfly wings, and characters within text. The installation includes beanbag chairs- mod furniture of the late 60s- and a television monitor that displays a montage of moving fantastical images so that visitors inhabit the space; jump into the water and become part of the three-dimensional rendering of the PsychedelicChick.com landscape. The notion of an expansive landscape bares relation to this domain name, as historically, landscapes have been feminized. Taking on the term Chick then can be regarded as a claiming of terrain, and a maternal nurturing.


 

 

 

Breathing Underwater, 2009floorcloth installation, variable size, painting/drawing, canvas, image transfer, acrylic paint, marker, chalk

swipe/drag image

Breathing Underwater was the environment created to house the larger project of Finding TrackHouse and Psychedelic Chick. It was created as an installation at the Red Head Gallery, and augmented the exhibition of a hybrid reality relational piece that took place in Second Life.


The floorcloths of the Breathing Underwater installation are an extension of textile design. The floorcloth tidal-waves out the doors of the gallery and seduces visitors in to float above lyrical images and texts, facets of the street outside throughout Spadina’s markets. The visitor orients their journey through the water tides. The gallery walls are left white and provoke visitors’ imaginations to project upon the surface and beyond; and emulate an ethereal cyberspace. It is fantastical and enchanting, yet composed of found materials, images, and tokens of exchange that resonate from our daily journeys and what is often discarded: takeout bags, newspapers, and price stubs. The visual idioms are appropriated into a rushing collage of seemingly free thoughts and exotic norms. Experiencing the journey relates to web-based experience, in that one chooses which icons to click and pages to crawl. Visitors float around the gallery as they would in cyber-scapes, and choose if and when to bend down to focus in on details like the saturated purples and blues of lily pads, delicate tie-dyed dragonfly wings, and characters within text. The installation includes beanbag chairs- mod furniture of the late 60s- and a television monitor that displays a montage of moving fantastical images so that visitors inhabit the space; jump into the water and become part of the three-dimensional rendering of the PsychedelicChick.com landscape. The notion of an expansive landscape bares relation to this domain name, as historically, landscapes have been feminized. Taking on the term Chick then can be regarded as a claiming of terrain, and a maternal nurturing.