Tuesday, September 7, 2010

the glow

Now that all of the work we've been up to installing is finally finished I realized that I didn't talk too much about the actual show! So...as I've been saying, we brought almost the entire set from the film to this museum in Arizona and we rebuilt it. But it wasn't just that- the house facades, the little neighboring houses that appear as Leonard's neighbors in the film, have been turned into screening rooms broadcasting short Gravity inspired pieces including words, sounds and images that are not included in the main film.

















 These screening houses (or as we like to say to the fire marshall "sculptures" so as to ease his actual housing fire-code addled brain) were blacked out using none other than those damn curtains I spent hours of my life sewing for the set when it was in the yard! Thank goodness those things aren't going to waste! Leonard's house is also on display, his uniquely crafted furniture and all, wide open and able to be peered into from all sides. This time we were even able to fit a larger section of the higher parts of the house but, still not quite all of it!

Brent also decided to keep sections of the house a little more bare than usual too which I think he did to steer people away from their obssession with the non-fiction part of the story, making the film set aspect stand out more and to draw a bigger parallel between the films narrative and the making of the films narrative or maybe even just make you look a little more closely at everything...I can't really say what his intentions were with this detail but it made the set take on a very stark, questioning quality that I think it needed in this still museum setting.
















  Lastly, the feature length version of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then is projected on the back wall of the gallery. At first we weren't sure about projecting the entire film thinking that people should really watch it from beginning to end but we also realized that experiencing Leonard's world and watching Leonard's world would create a unique immersive experience. Judging by the amount of people (myself included) who kept finding themselves (screw gun in hand during install even) drawn to the strange warm film glow at any point of the features duration makes me think it was definitely a great idea to share all of Gravity with each museum goer, whether they stand there for 75minutes or not!