SIxteen Windows (Polyopticon I)
Johnson, Vermont
August 2006
This piece is entitled ‘Sixteen Windows’ in reference to the sixteen major windows illuminating what was once the town hall for Johnson, Vermont. It’s an archetypal example of an early 19th century New England meeting house, originally a congregational church but converted into an opera house and municipal hall after its first 40 years, around 1870. It is now the lecture hall for the Vermont Studio Center residency program.
The heart of the piece is a carefully engineered camera obscura configuration: in each darkened window, a lens-mirror-box-windowcover combination reflects and focuses the sky and horizon outside onto the ceiling just inside. From the floor of the room you look up to the high upper ceiling at an apparently continuous projection of clouds, sun, sky and treetops from the four windows on each side. The lower story windows project onto the ceiling beneath the balcony in a similar way, but the projections include some of the neighboring architecture, and can be scrutinized more closely from the floor. The images are live, full color, richly present.
The visual effect of the subtle light, the movement of trees and clouds and air and the quiet, contemplative atmosphere in the subdued illumination are very difficult to document objectively. Time-lapses, while accelerating the natural changes in light, are the closest thing to a representation of the viewer’s experience that I can offer. However, what is not communicated by still or moving images is the slow dilation of one’s irises in the low light, the silent coolness of the space, and especially the presence of other viewers moving, observing, talking quietly. The piece is as much about a communal experience as about a visual reconfiguration of the outside world on a specific architectural space.
Thanks for support go to the Vermont Studio Center and Sam and Dusty Boynton.