Installations

Gasoline Puddles at the Alameda Library

The gasoline puddle creates rainbows because the oil and water interface reflects. The thickness of the oil layer is less than the wave lengths of the different colours of light and reflects the different frequencies at different phases causing interference cancelling and also different angles of refraction.

In this project, a silhouetted dancer performs an interpretative dance of eloquent movements, grand swooshes and cutting arm gestures. Live video captures and mirrors the viewer, embeds them below the interpretative dancer, just as in the gasoline puddle, the water floats the gasoline atop of it. Her energetic dance is slowed to a meditative study of gracefulness. Further video manipulations shift and fragment her silhouette, as the light is refracted between the gasoline and the water, stretching out time before the viewer, inviting reflection by the viewer as they see mirrored glimpses of themselves beneath the distortions.

This project allows the viewers to become the subjects as well as co-creators, providing another path for viewers to re-contextualize environment and re-imagine themselves, like the rainbow transforms the gasoline puddle into something momentarily wonderful.

Participate in this transformation at:

SSSHHHH!! Quiet Music at the Alameda Library
May 5, 8PM-10PM, 2012
1550 Oak Street
Alameda, CA

www.ubuibi.org/ssshhhh.html

Building Imagination

Collaborating with the Modesto Art Museum, artists Jessica Gomula-Kruzic and Christian Hali will create a four-part video response to Modesto’s ranking as the most unlivable city in the country. Through this video, we will explore some of the reasons for Modesto’s low ranking and re-image ways for the city to become a more livable place. Our goal is to confront the area’s poverty of imagination by using art – the videos, architecture, and design – to inspire creativity to help solve the area’s many urban problems.
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Release Me [Through Projection Streaking]

For some people in our current global climate and personal lives, forward movement and progress seemed to have stalled, and some people feel as if they are simply treading water, running in place. For example, on a recent Marketplace interview on American Public Media, Jeremy Hobson interviewed Irene Cowan about her experiences in light of the current economic recession. “I think I feel more like I’m stuck, like my feet are in concrete or something. Every time I think, well, I’ll do this, I just feel like I can’t make the move.” (continue reading…)