Making Unsharp?

2020

This work explores the ways the experience of unsettling can open new ways of thinking about interiors, architecture and the built environment. We ask what it would mean to position disorientation as the default way of experiencing the world as opposed belonging, stability and permanence. Rather than trying to fix, stabilize and reify, this work explores spaces of potential and possibility through unsettling and disorientation.

This installation explores a conventional and everyday element, the window, within TIER.space (Institute of Endotic Research). Unsettling the window, the installation dismantles assumptions about what is interior and what is exterior, about the function of a window as both a viewing device and something that provides daylight. Through the technique of the camera obscura, it explores how seeing can happen in the dark. In fact, it is precisely by taking away any visibility through the window away, by making it opaque, that visibility through the camera obscura is made possible. In this opaque foil, three coin sized apertures are made, and immediately blocked by three camera obscura boxes. Through the hole in the foil, and three further pin holes per box, the image of the exterior is iteratively cast onto the screen within obscura boxes in threes. The interior of the boxes are made of mirrors which mirror the exterior to infinity. This unsettling experience questions the role of the window as mere threshold between interior and exterior, and begins, instead, to contain the exterior, even bringing the exterior within the interior itself.