Blue is an Agreement, came from the realisation that it is possible to change the perceived colour of the sky by changing the colour of the frame through which it is seen. This simple but profound experience led me to reflect on how framing shapes our ways of seeing and being in the world. If the content is not only held, but shaped by the frame; can we change the story by changing the frame?
The installation for wsb Open Studios is a walk through a three-story a building in which the audience encounter the staging of different encounters with the sky. The work uses a richly layered sensory experience to open up a conversation about how we organise and to what we give value. It invites us to look anew at the everyday. To give time for observing what is already there and creates a moment to reconnect; both with yourself and with the sky. It also questions the workings of our consumer society, which extracts from nature in order to create products that sell us back the very nature they are depleting, with each room being constructed around the consumer strategies of added value and limited time.
The work is site-responsive. It frames compositions of light, sound and objects in the architecture of the space. It uses two main strategies; staging 'impossible' realities, and framing or mediating the sky to create a different context through which to see the everyday. 'Sunrise is a Bank' invites audiences to activate a staged sunrise in which all of the elements of a sunrise- the spectrum of colours, soft mist and the glowing sun are decontextualised, placed on pedestals, and framed in the architecture of the space. 'Bottled Sky' restricts the viewers access to the actual sky and gives it back to them via a clearly revealed video mediation. A live stream of the sky is projected on a circular screen reminiscent of a corona. Once activated, this private sky is only visible for 4 minutes, with the sound track of an increasingly populated sky continuing after the video is closed, leaving the viewer to question the transparency of the work and what it is they are really seeing and hearing.
The third attempt, 'Blue is an Agreement' uses a led light installation to slowly change the colour of a window frame through which only the sky is visible. Viewers are invited to simply look at the sky as it changes colour in relation to the soft colour shifts of the window frame. It softly insists on the question; if the frame can change the colour of the sky, then what else could be possible? Emerging onto the roof "What makes you look up" is a mirror installation, that frames the sky the viewer is in. These four attempts are connected by a soundscape, which travels though the three floors of the building, leaking into the surrounding area from the roof and through the building's intercom system to street level. Through these different attempts we invite the spectator to give time to the other possible realities that could emerge, or are already present, when we look beyond the agreed parameters of a space. If blue is an agreement…then what else is?
Concept vinny jones
Developed in collboration with Shaly Lopez and Leon Spek with the support of workspacebrussels and wpzimmer
