Luminous Bodies Residency
Gibraltar Point Arts Centre, Toronto Island — September 16–29, 2024
In September 2024, I participated in the Luminous Bodies artist residency at Gibraltar Point Arts Centre on Toronto Island, directed by artist and educator Teresa Ascencao. During the two-week residency, I worked in my studio while also participating in discussions, studio visits, and exchanges with the other artists in residence.
During the residency I developed a studio installation as a space for experimenting with live-feed video, projection, physical objects, drawing and performance. Cameras recorded activity taking place within the studio and returned it to the space as projected imagery. I was interested in the relationships that could develop between a physical action, the person or object being recorded, and its simultaneous appearance elsewhere in the studio through live video.
I also experimented with making the projectors themselves mobile. I placed projectors on swivel chairs and attached ropes to the chairs so that I could pull and rotate them during the performance. As the chairs swivelled, the projected images moved in arcs along the walls and through the installation. This allowed the position and movement of the projections to become another improvised element within the performance.
For the final public event on September 29, I turned the installation into a collaborative and participatory performance involving one planned participant and three people who joined the performance spontaneously.The collaborative performance itself was entirely improvised. Each participant seemed to have their own informal score, entering the projection environment individually and allowing the other performers their own space and time.
At different moments I interacted with individual participants, while at other times I remained in the background as they progressed through their own actions with the materials and objects. There was no predetermined sequence, but an understanding seemed to emerge among the participants about when to enter, when to wait, and when to allow another person to perform. During the final closing performance, the studio became a temporary public laboratory for experimenting with bodies, objects, live-feed video, moving projections, and improvisation.
The project continued my ongoing work with collaborative performance and live-feed projection and became part of the development that continued during my subsequent residency at Bajo El Olivo in southern Spain and my Open Studioexhibition at AllArtNow in Stockholm later in 2024.
Video Documentation: View the Luminous Bodies playlist of edited videos documenting the final performance, rehearsals, and installation experiments during the residency: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLImia5qLiBr0
