“Searchlight” is a site-specific light installation (3 projectors + 3 turning mirrors, 8 minutes of a projection-mapped video-loop) at Lighthouse Gallery, the exhibition is staged in the shop window of 67. Piac Street, Debrecen, Hungary, from March 5-28th., 2021.
The Italian humanist painter Leon Battista Alberti changed the European Painting tradition by presupposing a fixed, abstract point of view that defines the viewer’s position from which the image becomes interpretable and receptive, from which the abstract appears to be an illusion of reality.
However, this ideal or perspective view also separates the recipient from the image, as it makes him an outsider, an observer of it. And if the experiencer is detached from the experience, it can easily cause a break in the free definition of his position as an individual artist and in the process of (self) cognition.
Immersive new media, such as video mapping, seek to eliminate this artificial distance: to reconcile the perspectives of the physical space, the projection point, and the viewer according to the rules of perspective. The point of view of Ivó Kovács’ space-specific light installation takes over the full shop window of Lighthouse Gallery. And just as we can’t enter the real space of the picture through Alberti’s “window,” so a glass surface is blocked from the interior’s physical space.
Searchlight, evoking the optical illusion of a virtual maze , reveals interlocking abstract (light) spaces in front of its viewer. The reflections of light that scan the walls, adjusted to the street perspective of passers-by and outsiders, are the searchlights. Temporarily illuminating certain parts of space as an allegory of self-search, encouraging us to experience our own presence and light.
VR-mono version (extract)
Installation: KOVÁCS Ivó
Creative Management: Let it Be! art agency
Organizers: Déri Museum, dr. István PUSKÁS
Co-organizers: Csokonai Theater, Cívis House
Sponsor: National Cultural Fund
Special Thanks: Tamás Herzceg, Glowing Bulbs
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