Interactive images drawin in light and shadow by STUDIO F-MINUS. (Mitchell F Chan & Brad Hindson)

June 8, 2009
At the Luminato Box in Brookfield Place.
Part of Toronto's Luminato Festival

DESCRIPTION:

The Shadows of Burden is a series of interactive media pieces in which light and shadow are used as a new medium for drawing, and as a metaphor commenting on the subject matter they project.

Unattended, each piece consists of an encaustic painting on linen, with a tangled nest of bent wire and rod protruding from the surface of the piece. As the viewer approaches, a light mounted in the painting’s frame fades on, and the seemingly random arrangement of wires is revealed to be a complicated sculpture casting the shadow of, in this series, a tragic character of Greek mythology at the moment of his punishment.

CONCEPT:

As light passes through an indecipherable three-dimensional entanglement in order to produce an understandable two-dimensional image, the relationship between these components serves as both the mechanism of execution and the metaphor of the subject matter.

The Burden of Sisyphus, for instance, presents to the viewer a centred, seemingly weightless round form, with the abstract arrangement of wires echoing the form of a boulder hanging in space. As the light breaks through the wire, creating the image of sisyphus struggling up the mountain, a hierarchy of causality is established: the rock is not the burden or tragic instrument of sisyphus; the hero is merely the artifice of the boulder. Sisyphus exists in our consciousness because of his punishment, not in spite of it. the sentiment of fatalism and romantic tragedy is carried through in the representation of Icarus' wings, Prometheus' viscera, the near invisibility of Eurydice, and the rest of the doomed figures as well. The necessity of the viewer's presence to activate these images underlines the sacrificial nature of these characters' fate.

A further conceptual investigation of these works occurred under the influence of professor James Elkins in his SAIC course Form and Deformation of the Human Body. This essay (click to download PDF) explores the materiality and subject matter of these pieces in terms that Elkins defines in his book Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis.