Illuminated Topographies - HMCrickenberger

Illuminated Topographies

Using Immersive Media to Locate Hidden Narratives in Analog Underpainting

Heather Marcelle Crickenberger

Illuminated Topographies: Using Immersive Media to Locate Hidden Narratives in Analog Underpainting

Heather Marcelle Crickenberger
[under construction as of April 2019]

In this exhibition, over 200 photographs of acrylic underpaintings were scaled up using high-resolution dual projection technology in order to create a performance space for the featured authors of the 2019 North Carolina Book Festival in the main gallery of the Contemporary Art Museum-Raleigh in Raleigh, NC from10:00 AM to 8:00 PM on Saturday, February 23, 2019.

This piece explores the usefulness of some of the earlier stages in the process of analog painting, particularly the function of underpainting which found an alternate function as a performance space, and so became a kind of framing venue.

The project explored paintings as, not only physical phenomena in themselves, hand-rendered and physically manipulatable, but as spaces of and for exploration. This spatial element became visible to me as I combined the concepts of panoramic macro photography with large-scale dual high resolution projection.

Viewing these barely visible details of my own paintings through the camera's lens and then expanding that topographic perspective into an immersive space--like a large gallery that had been transformed into a performance venue--helped me better grasp the rhetorical concepts of scaling, repurposing, and remediation, and the manner in which immersive art forms like dual 4K/UHD projection and digital media drawn from repurposed hand-rendered physical paintings (or "acrylic analogs") can be used to augment our perception of physical spaces and concrete objects.

Immersing the audience in a shifting panoramic display of abstract landscapes as the festival's featured authors and performers filled the gallery with sound and language forced a shift in my own perspective as well as the discovery of new narratives and new terrains for inquiry and imagination.

KEY CONCEPTS, NOTES, & POST-EXHIBITION REFLECTIONS

IMMERSIVE ART

Seurat, Monet, Matisse -- size used as a means of immersion. Here, size is used to map the projected images in a much larger size than they would normally be seen on a computer or in printed media -- so that they might be inhabited instead of observed as objects in the traditional sense. This immersive effects lends the intricacies of hand-painted two-dimensional surfaces, exploring their depth and structures in a way that transforms them into actual terrains, for wandering--for the imagination.

PROJECTION

Projection as an art form has several unique qualities: a particular image can be cast onto a particular surface as opposed to an image taking shape on a digital display of fixed pixels....[more on this later...]

IMMERSION & FRAMING

Immersive artworks simultaneously function as frame and surface for content. The goal is to appear seamless, vast, even endless, but in the case of an installation for an event--a performance space--the inclusion of additional content results in the framing function....it is content added to content [more on this later....]

The analog versions of the backgrounds—small—lacking in subject—appear empty whereas immersive backgrounds expand outward to fill up empty space, as in the case of this exhibition, the solitary visual art display in a completely white gallery....

The emptiness of the walls came forward as the projectors were turned off.

RECEPTION IN DISTRACTION & WALTER BENJAMIN

Walter Benjamin talked about "reception in distraction" as a way that humans passively receive visual information in an increasingly inscribed world....

UNDERPAINTING & WILLIAM BLAKE

Underpainting is simply any type of painting that is meant to be painted over or into at a later stage. Sometimes, often in oils, people do underpainting in order to layer different hues and achieve depth in portraiture or landscapes. The idea is that there is an image underneath the surface of the painting that radiates through and illuminates the painting.

Oftentimes underpainting is very bright and radiant in color, while the top layer painted over it is rich and darker in color. The result is an illuminated effect where light seems to be emanating from the painting. William Blake used the technique in painting as well as the printing process, and it is his version of underpainting that I had at the forefront of my mind when I began this project.

The combined power of the underpainting with gold leaf overlays sets his work aflame in a sense--bringing light to the surface from above and below. The effect of the technique in his work is a fiery, living feel. Blake used the technique for his poetry as well, illuminating the language that was printed on top of the bright and colorful underworks.

CMYK VS RGB

Around the same time that I was invited to participate in the festival, I was also experimenting with the different sorts of colors that could be created with a CMYK palette, as opposed to the RGB that I had used my whole life. In a blissful smear of productivity, I layered many canvases in bright color combinations over a short number of weeks. I also found some abandoned underpaintings that I had never returned to which were scattered about the studio. From these, I created palettes and then covered other canvases with similar colors, heavy with the knife, heavy with globs of white viscous paint. These were painted as backgrounds from the start. That was a different thing for me.

TOPOGRAPHIES & SPATIAL NARRATIVES

In this project, the land as a concept was a formulating issue, the smoothness of the terrain, the lack of any boundaries except those carved by the forces of nature. No walls, no dotted lines, no fences--just open spaces in the paint where an eye could wander without concern.

Colors evoke feelings of times of year, of places, geographies--times of day or during weather events. Certain colors are hardwired to cause alarm--the red, for example.

Characters emerge in the spaces, though not often human characters. Because of the ways that some species move, like birds or insects or fish, the murmuration/swarm/school formation became a refrain for me in the editing process. I found these patterns in the underpaintings and used my macro settings to pull them out of the tiny physical spaces they inhabited in the underpaintings and threw them onto the walls, world-sized.

TIME AS A LAYER

Ephemeral moments became more permanent through digital photography and projection, becoming the physical reality in the space of the event's venue. It creeps into the backgrounds of social media and other postings, multiplying its digital variations....

This exhibition was brief only lasting 10 hours in a single day, yet it is this layer of a proscribed time in space that created the event and therefore the case for the exhibition. In this format, a documentary webpage, the project lives on--or in hard copy prints or snips and pieces floating around in social media....

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