SPEC-TA-CULUM Inversions / Shaft Mining, 2019
Materials: mobile phones, salvaged materials, LED lights, tar paper, steel shop table, plexiglass great-grandfathers autobiography, family and personal objects.
peep holes to “pepper’s ghost” inversions
This is my first attempt at working with a 400 page autobiography that my great grandfather wrote. Percy was born in 1874 in Chicago, and was a mining engineer in South Africa and Canada. He also was an investor in "Spoor's SPEC-TA-CULUM" a 2,000 person theatre that showed footage of Niagara Falls in 3D during the 1933 World's Fair, “Century of Progress”.
The five peepholes hold crankily built wooden “theatres”, visible from the exterior and made from repurposed wood and discarded smartphones. The videos, installed as “Pepper’s Ghost” images are installed as peepholes in the walls of the dark room. “Peppers Ghost” is an optical illusion that gives the appearance of the footage floating in space, similar to a hologram. Four of the videos were different iterations of me topless, doing headstands (or inversions) in Niagara Falls and a black void. https://vimeo.com/327721051
