CHROMAZONE
Chromazone is about the creation of memorable perceptual experience. It explores optical complexity, ambiguity and mutability within an outline of formal austerity. It operates with the knowledge that perceptually equivocal conditions can situate experience in enigmatic places that resist interpretation.
Giving onto both the entry hall and elevated courtyard of the Centre culturel de Notre-Dâme-de-Grâce in Montreal, it is a work for people to perceive and participate with in community with other people.
Employing dichroic glass, one’s experience of the work is transformed instantaneously through movement. This is because the glass’s colours, reflections, hues and saturation levels slowly morph as one moves around the work and as light conditions vary during the day.
THE HALL: DAYTIME
In the daytime, light is transmitted through the glass and into the hall. The glass is perceived as coloured and transparent. When looked at it directly, it is mostly blue. Yet when one looks at it in oblique, the colours slowly change to purple, then to magenta, orange and finally to amber.
DEPTH, DIAGONALS
A slim aluminum frame and a built up steel beam, each of which is 450mm in depth, sit within a 3 x 8 inch HSS frame provided for the work. The 450mm depth allows for the positioning of the glass diagonally across its length - and in opposite directions above and below the beam. Because the colours of the glass and the disposition of reflections change with one’s location in space, these converse diagonals generate additional layers of perceptual complexity when viewed in oblique.
THE HALL: EVENING
In the evening, a minimum of light is transmitted from outside, through the glass and into the hall. And because the hall is artificially lit, the unique properties of the glass cause it to work as a mirror. The coloured reflections of the glass normally range from gold to amber to turquoise, while mixing with the colours of the hall.
THE COURTYARD: DAYTIME
In the daytime, very little light is transmitted from the hall through the glass and into the courtyard. Therefore, the glass works in reflection. It is golden in colouration.
THE COURTYARD: EVENING
In the evening, we see through the glass into the artificially lit hall; the glass taking on the appearance of a dramatically coloured lantern, creating a particularly convivial place to spend time during the intermissions of evening time events.
