Waver

About the work

Waver explores a connection between the ambivalent feelings experienced before the vastness of nature and those encountered through intimacy and love. Embracing another person can offer closeness and reassurance while leaving a distance between individual experiences. The installation gives this simultaneous proximity and separation a spatial form.

Nine small screens showing embracing couples are distributed across three Acrow props in a room covered with sand. In front of them, a larger projection falls onto semi-transparent fabric, carrying fragmented sunlight and solitary figures. The fabric is both an image surface and a physical separation between the viewer and the smaller screens. Images of being alone overlap with images of being together, without their different positions or distances disappearing.

As viewers approach or move sideways, the images become partially obscured, revealed or aligned in new ways. Their distance and orientation affect which relationships can be perceived. The desire to come closer remains accompanied by the separation between a body in the installation and the intimacy shown on a screen. Through this arrangement, Waver extends montage into the viewer’s bodily exploration of space. Its distributed screens and layered surfaces form an early investigation of how spatial montage can make the conditions of perception apparent, informing the subsequent development of Willow.