Stories of Gravity
Projection Installation
2010
Stories of Gravity is a series of animations for elevators.
The first pair of these animations, collectively titled Your Love Keeps Lifting Me, was commissioned By EMPAC, (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center), Troy, New York, for the exhibition Dancing on the Ceiling, curated by Kathleen Forde. This pair was installed in and around the glass elevator of the building. As you called the elevator, a surveillance camera mounted in the shaft detected the motion, triggering and controlling the speed and direction of the animations. They appear both on a monitor inside the cab and projected onto the glass above the elevator doors.
Your Love Keeps Lifting Me started with a general notion of interdependence, both in physical and psychological terms. You can’t see the video without the motion of the elevator cab, which is in turn dependent on the user pressing the call button. For me, this physical contingency mirrors the psychological interdependence of a relationship. Often we begin a relationship as a kind of a dance, a little awkward at first until we find our footing. Then, as we become more familiar with each other, individual rhythms synchronize and we move as one. I wanted to give physical form to the moment when the gravity in a relationship fluctuates, exposing the beauty in interdependence.
