The title of the interactive participatory site-specific installation/environment refers to Lucy R. Lippard’s essay “Up Down and Across: A New Frame for New Quilts”. The nature of the floor plan and the transitional element between spaces allowed me to design smaller site-specific installations/environments. This colorful interactive environment works with the basic visual expressive devices of line, color, surface and space, mixing and transforming them from surface representation to space.
Through “drawing” lines in space, we create obstacles to movement for the viewer that define their movement in space. Three colored spotlights are placed between the obstacles – stretched lines, in the basic colors – blue, green and red. The reflectors project the colored lights and shadow play on the walls of the room.
The movement of the viewer, the lines of the white strips – obstacles, the colored lights and the walls of the room together create a luminous play of shadows – a secondary temporary drawing projected on the walls of the room. This transformation of the environment that happens while the viewer is in it is for me the equivalent of human communication and human encounters, as much as the crossing of warp and weft in the waste materials that are created in its production. By using waste material, which I also work within my other projects, I refer to the dying tradition of the textile industry in Europe and the Trenčín region. The material has its smell of cotton and wool, which can evoke different associations in the viewer. The interactive environment is an analogy of the diversity of human beings’ race, opinion, gender, education, etc. which are, however, the same in their biological essence. However, a different, additional mixing of colors arises on the clothes of the spectator.
Color Dance will be an event for the participants (audience, spectators). It is a workshop of light and lines – understood as a spatial score that forms a separate event as the opening of the exhibition. The audience will be dressed in different colored t-shirts. They would be allowed to take turns. They can record the process of their interaction in the environment with smartphones as a process of creating an alternative temporary drawing – a record of their stay in the space of the environment (also during the duration of the exhibition). Sharing on social media is welcome! @luciahornak
The subject of the artist dr. Lucia Horňáková Černayová’s (1983) research is the relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary in the field of human life and creativity on two different approaches. One is working with soft waste material and the other is participatory strategies. Participatory strategies allow for a specific approach to making that intersects with the natural behavior and existence of women in a ‘non-visual, non-artistic’ life. The natural intersections between these realms happen through elemental actions. There are also areas that emerge in her work: working with the openness of the artwork, activating the viewer and working with non-art material. An important moment in her work has become the non-/ordinary work – the immaterial “product” that is created in the relationship between the viewer, the physical work of visual art and the artist. This special “product” she tries to realize with the audience, but also with a special viewer – the family. In 2024, she received her PhD degree in Art from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystica, Slovakia. Her video object Sphere of Influence was presented in 2023 at the Tapestry Triennial in Lodz, in Poland.
Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council
up,
down,
left and right
Lucia Horňáková Černayová (SK)
VAA gallery Artifex, Gaono str. 1, Vilnius (Lithuania)
09/07 – 26/07/2024
Photography: @LightStrokePhoto (Valerija Semeniuk, Justas Gulbinovičius)
