Over the weekend I decided to attend the Gibson + Recoder Artist Talk to learn more about media such as art installations and camera obscuras. This was taught by internationally celebrated artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder as shown on the right.

Gibson and Recoder started this talk by going over some of the their art installations and what they did to achieve these pieces.

One of them in particular that caught my attention was the installation Available light.

This is a really interesting piece as it plays a lot with light and color. Surprisingly, this is made without a camera as they use color negative stock which is exposed to direct sunlight on both sides of the film roll. The artists described that they use whats called raw stock and 400 foot negative films rather than putting it in the camera. There are two sources of light hitting the core. Gibson and Recoder say that this installation is an “optical density through which the vertical medium takes a sidelong glance at itself via long exposures”.

_{Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder Available Light}

Having done some art installations myself throughout art class in high-school, seeing them done with a focus on film was really interesting to see. I was also excited to learn more about camera obscuras since I had never heard about them before. Gibson and Recoder talked about this one installation they did in Madison Square Park called Topsy-Turvy. With a camera obscura you can capture what the world looks like around you in a darkened space inside, upside down. They did just that in this park of New York City:

In the photo above on the right you can see a white cylinder shape. This is actually what the instillation looks like on the outside. In the photo on the left you can see what it looks like to be inside that cylinder, observing the beautiful city of New York with the work of the camera obscura. The minds behind this Installation Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder explained that they like to think of it as a moving image rather than a resting image. They wanted Topsy-Turvy to be like people exited out of reality into another reality. To them, it was almost as if you entered a video, and like you’re constantly going in and out of focus.

Gibson and Recoder expressed their frustration for having the installation as somewhere as busy as Madison Square Park as there was a long line outside the piece for a while. They said people only had 1 to 2 minutes each immersed in that world and they really wanted people to have as much time as they wanted to get the full experience. They ended up re-doing this installation in much quieter places in the future where it was much more peaceful and less crowded.

I had so much fun learning about the Film Art Installations and Camera Obsuras by the incredible artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder!