Monday, January 26, 2009

MIT Exhibition - luminous Windows


One of my holograms - 'the Good medicine Cabinet' can be seen at an exhibition at the MIT Museum in Cambridge MA, in the USA at the moment. I've included the 'mock-up' of how the hologram would look - and how it actually looks - the hologram can be seen to the right of the large pile of snow.





The hologram - made with the help of holographer Sam Moree - at the Holocenter, in Long Island City, NY - during an Arts Residency - is a back-lit transmission hologram mounted in the door of a medicine cabinet.

The exhibition has situated 5 holograms from different artists in the windows of the Museum which can be seen most clearly - at night, when they are lit up.
The Good Medicine Cabinet explores our reflective nature, and how it can inspire personal, spiritual, and social change. On one level, the piece is a hologram of medicine bottles sitting inside a medicine cabinet. At a second level of reflection, the hologram is mounted on glass in the door of a real medicine cabinet and a third level of reflection can been seen when the viewer’s image is visible in the reflection on the glass surface of the hologram, superimposed on the bottles of “good medicine.”

The medicines in the cabinet have labels, but the graphics have been altered so that that the bottles appear to contain human emotions and personality traits—anger, pain, procrastination, joy, and judgementalism, among others. The labels denote the positive and negative traits and emotions which are vital to learning on a spiritual journey. (To subvert the product advertising, the original labels were scanned, modified, and the new labels re-imposed onto original packaging.)

Our reflective nature gives us the ability to contain our natural impulses, to aspire to be and do better. Because of it, we get to choose who we want to be on a day-by-day basis. While changing our nature sometimes seems impossible, it can be done—with daily reflection and the decision to act differently. That's what I intended the Good Medicine Cabinet to communicate - but anyone seeing the cabinet may think differently. Thanks to Seth Riskin of MIT for the photos.