Strange Juxapositions
The Crawl Space Bruce Slatter
A little over twenty years ago, I spent some time snoozing in the roof space of this gallery. Up above the ceiling panels and out of sight, I reclined in the darkness. The crawl space was an ideal hiding spot and offered a moment of calm and respite, as tiredness and fatigue from long days of physical installation work started to take their toll. The light from the gallery below created a bright grid on the ceiling. From my unusual vantage point, the video work below created strips of blue hue between the square panels. It made my ceiling panel like a raft in an enveloping darkness. I closed my eyes to block out the light and the afterglow of the grid gave me the sense I was in a Tron-like video game. As the light diminished from the back of my retina, I thought about the video work being installed below. The artwork was a two-projection video installation called Around Now by the Irish artist Grace Weir. It was an aerial portrait of a cloud filmed from a small plane as it flew around the cloud. The opposing screen showed the view out the other window of the plane, as if looking from the cloud’s perspective and across what looked like bucolic green fields of the Irish countryside. Around Now was a work about the slippage that occurs between two viewpoints, with the video installation creating a physical and conceptual ‘space in-between’ that the viewer could inhabit. From my viewpoint in the ceiling, the slippage I was experiencing, was a ‘space in-between’, being semi-awake and being in deep, deep sleep. As I thought about the large, white, soft, fluffy cloud on show in the gallery, I thought about sleep and about art. 43
