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Friday, June 29, 2012

Visual Art Currently Hanging: Have You Ever Been Inside A Camera Obscura?

Posted by Jen Graves on Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 4:30 PM

Levi Fuller

This is a photograph taken of the world passing by outside, projected inside Ellen Sollod's new installation at Jack Straw Gallery.

Her installation celebrates Jack Straw's 50th anniversary by turning the gallery into a camera obscura. An accompanying sound score is made of historical and contemporary found noise, samplings from the life of the new media center.

Sollod made the camera obscura by covering a gallery window with a sheet of opaque black plastic with a hole cut in it. She mounted a lens in the blackout shade on the window, and voilà! Live projection with an ancient twist.

The show is open weekdays through August 17.

Want to make a tour of it? There's a great camera obscura in Vancouver, B.C., at UBC's Belkin Gallery. It's a permanent installation by Rodney Graham. The projection happens inside a 19th-century horse-drawn landau carriage (!) parked inside a glass pavilion built especially for it. The outside vision you see is of a landscaped garden, with a young sequoia tree in the center. It's called Millennial Time Machine, and here's a view:

Courtesy Belkin Gallery/UBC

In far more contemporary camera news, have you heard about the new "best pocket camera ever made"?

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Yes, I have. I was inside one at the Frost Museum located inside the Florida Internatinal University in Miami. It was a great experience. I also remember some amazing pictures taken inside rooms turned cameras obscuras in places like Paris or New York. Don't remember the name of the photographer or artist. If you can, go!

Posted by xjuan on June 29, 2012 at 5:01 PM

Now would not be a particularly good time to see the camera obscura at UBC. There's hella construction.

Posted by sahara29 on June 29, 2012 at 6:08 PM

I saw the one in Vancouver, before it was in that nifty enclosure.
I missed seeing the oermanent one in Santa Monica (built in, i think, the 50's) by half an hour. It closes to the public early.

Posted by Dr_Awesome on June 29, 2012 at 6:56 PM

The best is the Camera Obscura in San Francisco, underneath the Cliff House by the Sutro Baths. There used to be a penny arcade there, with all Victorian penny amusement machines, but they moved that somewhere else. No matter; it's a wonderful thing to see all by itself.

Posted by Fnarf

on June 29, 2012 at 10:27 PM

@4,

Beat me to it. Love me some Cliff House.

They moved the Musee Mecanique to Fisherman's Wharf, which I was more than apprehensive about, but they have room to display a lot more stuff so it's actually completely awesome.

Posted by Mr. X on June 30, 2012 at 9:26 AM

The last show at Carole Fuller's FUEL Gallery in Pioneer Square (1995) was a camera obscura by Mark McLoughlin. Two, actually. One was in the front gallery and the other in the back, projecting the King Street Station tower through the skylight onto the gallery floor. It was mesmerizing.

Posted by Nelson Bradley on July 1, 2012 at 11:48 AM