Media - ross mcleod

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The development of this process led me on to working with Barbara Kruger
on a series of projects that have been done all over the world in a number of
architectural configurations and using from nine projectors to twenty projectors.
These projects involved the calculation of perspective distortion, how to get the
projectors into the ceiling and out of the gallery space and programming the work
so that it acted like a clock and didn’t have to be turned on and off and reset,
as the works would sometimes run for two months. What interested me was
the complete sense of the installation, architecturally wrapping the entire space
including the floor, how three projected images would make up one image on a
wall and how the projections could be negotiated around the building’s columns.
Recently I installed projections at three sites simultaneously for the Perth Festival:
at Barrack Arch at the top of King Georges Terrace, at His Majesty’s Theatre and
at the Duxton Hotel. Public building projects such as these offer the opportunity
to play with site and memory. The terrace had been entirely stripped of historical
buildings so the projection became the opportunity to put one back into it. With
His Majesty’s Theatre, which had had its original verandahs removed, I used
four projectors on angles from the awnings of buildings across the road which
worked together to fit the original façade verandah detail back onto the building.
The Duxton Hotel offered the opportunity to create a sixty-metre-tall, twenty-eight
image show based on the theme of migration.
I like the idea of taking on the side of the building and creating a new façade out
of it. With these new techniques it means that instead of it being a happenstance
notion of projection onto the buildings surface I can actually start to sculpt the
projected images into the building’s fabric and history.
Barrack Arch Projection Ian De Gruchy His Majesty’s Theatre Projection Ian De Gruchy