I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and all traditional custodians on whose land I occupy. I pay my respects to Elders both past and present, their culture and their continued connection to land and community.
The building is the medium. This is not a metaphor.
Since 2008, working with The Electric Canvas, I have projected light onto the Sydney Opera House, the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Flinders Street Station, Customs House, the MCA, and the opening ceremony of the Canada Winter Olympics. The work exists only while the light is on. When the light goes off, there is nothing. No object. No residue. No certificate of authenticity. Just a building that was briefly something else and is now itself again.
This is the most honest thing I have made. The immaterial as a practice position is not a concept I arrived at theoretically. I arrived at it practically, standing in a car park at 2am in front of a 40,000 lumen projector pointed at a facade that cost more to build than most countries spend on art in a decade, waiting for the image to line up with the architecture. The work disappears. The building stays. I go home.
Working at this scale inside public festivals, Vivid Sydney, Enlighten Canberra, Melbourne White Night, Adelaide Festival, is also working inside a libidinal economy of spectacle. The city turns itself into a destination. The crowd comes to feel something it can photograph. The projection is the thing they photograph. The projection is light. You cannot photograph light without the surface it falls on, which means you are always photographing the building and calling it the art, which is actually correct, which is the joke and also not the joke.
The collaborations matter as much as the surfaces. Projecting Club Ate's In Muva We Trust onto the National Gallery of Australia during Enlighten 2020, ancestral beings and LGBTQI+ community drawn from Filipino Australian experience bathing an institution that has historically struggled to hold that kind of image. Reko Rennie's work on the ACMI building at Federation Square in 2016. These are not decoration. These are arguments made at architectural scale, in public, in the dark, for several hours, and then gone.
The wall is borrowed. The image is temporary. The act of working is the practice. I have been doing this since 2008 and I have nothing to show for it, which is exactly right.
The work disappears. The building stays. I go home.
Large scale architectural projection mapping
The Electric Canvas, Sydney
2008 onwards
