Tours en l’air (2019)
Single channel HD video, stereo.
Digitized abstract from painting, tooled digital objects, animation, sound.
I derived the central abstract for this piece from Ghirlandaio's The Marriage of the Virgin (1479), published in the public domain by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I then sampled the abstract, producing a series of 16 x 9 panels. These are presented like tones in serial musical composition – prime, retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion. One "sees" the entire abstract in time, presented as an ordered series of fragments. The grid structure references the rediscovery of perspective in Ghirlandaio's era. The abstract fragment-object repeatedly performs tours en l'air (turns in the air), each turn pausing in a balletic pose.