MOVING STILL
In this sprawling, multi-sensory installation, artist duo Collis/Donadio explore a 1954 essay by Edwin Denby, titled Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets. Adapted for the Academy Art Museum’s Spitaleri Gallery from existing and new footage, the piece serves as a meditation on noticing beautiful movements in everyday life and recognizing them as a type of dance, as Denby describes and illustrates in his essay. There is, indeed, gorgeous movement in the elongation of shadows, the movement of clouds, the rippling of water, and even crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at rush hour, as captured by Collis/Donadio and delivered through a complex process of projection mapping onto exhibition display equipment, such as pedestals and moveable walls. Typically seen as ordinary support pieces that only come alive when tangible art objects are placed upon them, these surfaces become windows into a subtle but profound celebration of life. If the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a new understanding of what it means to be living, this realistic but strangely ebullient visual poem, made as much of blue sky as it is of cement and power line, may capture it.
The Movable Image: Video Art by Collis/Donadio, Shala Miller and Rachel Schmidt curated/text by Mehves Lelic
On view at: The Academy Art Museum, January-March, 2022
Installation view, multi-channel digital video projection, quadraphonic sound. Academy Art Museum, 2022