Lightfoot

Hello and welcome back from your holiday reverie.
So. A while ago, before my classes were done, I went over to the second opening at Ditch Projects
in Springfield, OR. I wrote about them before.




















I'm a fan of what they're doing there. Artist collective kind of thing. Getting some MFA ideas out there where the public can see them. Hamm's.

That said, the last offering was, as my friend Ellen Ito would say, "a little heavy-handed." Touted as a cooperative installation celebrating Gordon Lightfoot, the remodeled industrial space was littered with contraptions that turned themselves on intermittently. It was exceedingly cold and much too dark in the space, so much so that it took my friends and I (a digital artist and an electrical engineer) a while to figure out what exactly was going on. This is what we figured out:

1. There was a wheel hooked to a stick hooked to a motor that spun it around on a track, triggering sensors as it went.
2. The sensors acted as switches to the various pieces arranged roughly radiated from them.
3. There was a lot of duct tape on the floor. It was ugly.
4. It was difficult to see how exactly these mechanisms related to Gordon Lightfoot.

So, past the basic mechanics of the installations, the actual pieces themselves were a varied bunch. For some reason UO students don't like labels or wall text, so I don't even know who made which piece. That makes it difficult. I thought this piece was the strongest in relation to the constant turning on and off:




















A big tube filled with lights and sound and whirring.
These photos were pretty cool, but I'm a sucker for high-gloss, nicely mounted pictures:



















I'm not sure how they tied in to the theme though.
And then there was a drum with a slide projector shining on it:























This is a piece by Dave Siebert who has been so kind as to link back here.


Yeah.
Ok. So, um, here are some tips. Turn up the lights a little so we can see the art. When the lights are up we notice more things, so presentation needs a little work. Text or a card or something so we know what's going on in your MFA heads.
All said and done, I'm still a fan of the concept and the way that these artists are using the space, but they've got some work to do as far as effective presentation of pieces and installations.