Project Description

Unpack the Sun Part ll, 2014-2015
Two-channel video
Duration: 04:04 minutes
Production and special effects: Tom Hillman

Since 2013, I have been taking photographs and videos of natural sunlight as it entered
my studio space. I also took photographs of shadows of American artist Alexander
Calder’s mobiles at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Unpack the Sun is a two-channel video projection of sunlight moving across two walls.
Daylight is portrayed in undulating geometric patterns. Repetition renders a hypnotic
rhythm of movement as a way to order and slow vision. Interruption and dissolve will still
time and create blanks that will allow for a subjective experience for the viewer.
Reoccurring shapes symbolize loss, forgetting and the persistence of memory.

Part ll shows the sun’s light shifting location on my dark studio walls. The sunlight
penetrated through circular openings in the curtains hanging by a window in the studio
creating binocular-like shapes that were projected onto a wall. Patterns created by
outside leaves moving with the wind became projected through these openings.
Flickering light punctuates the dark studio mimicking how memories return. I have
interrupted the video with still photographs of shadows of Calder’s mobiles. The
shadows are woven into the sunlight’s patterns of leaves that move and repeat almost
hypnotically. Details of the mobiles, that at first fit into the two binocular shapes,
gradually replace the sunlight patterns and extend onto an adjoining wall.