Container Project by Adia Sisson
Create a darkroom in the cubby with polaroids and sheet music hanging from string under red light over pixel art in developer trays. A tablecloth is suspended from the cubby to the pillar. A string with sheet music and empty spaces hangs across the tablecloth. Binder clips and colorized historical photos and black and white modern ads are provided in a developer tray for viewers to hang. A cardboard gramophone with a spinning record video on an iPad sits on a table next to the tray of photos, playing My Neck, My Back by Richard Cheese.
We were inspired by hanging installations such as Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Couleurs de L’ombre (Sugimoto), who was inspired by polaroids. We took this idea of hanging polaroids and other 2D objects from above, incorporating sheet music and other images. Sanna Dullaway is one artist who creates colorized versions of historical photographs, and we wanted to incorporate her modern-looking historical snapshots to comment on how taking things from the past and inserting them into modern life doesn’t make them modern but also doesn’t accurately preserve their original aura. Taking things out of time skews their meaning, as their context is different, and the viewer is seeing it from a different mindset than viewers in the thing’s own time. We chose to use black and white advertisements from the 90s and 2000s for this same reason—making modern things appear old just feels…wrong. For an immersive experience, we chose to use Richard Cheese’s rendition of “My Neck, My Back”. This supports this uncomfortable feeling by forcing an explicit and modern song into a retro context with the use of the swing genre.
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