The Clouds Are Not Like Either One...
Viktoria Schmid
The Clouds Are Not Like Either One – They Do Not Keep One Form Forever
Film installation with 3 x 16mm projectors, 3 projection screens, black and white with colored filters
Austria 2015
Image above: bb15 exhibition view, photo by Patrick Anthofer
Like several contemporary artists working with analog film (see, for instance, Esther Urlus), Schmid’s installation piece involves looking back to the early pioneers of photochemical processes in order to re-imagine and reinvent them in the present. This piece is based on James Clerk Maxwell’s method of additive color mixing that produced the first color photograph (by Thomas Sutton) in 1861. The process involves placing red, green and blue filters in front of the camera lens, turning a black and white image into a subtly tinted exposure.
In this piece, Schmid uses three 16mm loops of clouds, filmed through red, green and blue filters and projected through a filter of the same color onto three staggered screens. The closest screen presents a triptych, with each color presented separately; as it bleeds through onto a second translucent screen further away, the image now overlaps, the clouds sliding past each other; finally, the third opaque screen presents all three colors in one single image, the culmination of the process. A sculptural installation that directs interest towards each individual component.
What if color film ceased to exist? Schmid asks this question in all seriousness, and provides an answer of sorts: return to the past and start again... (Kim Knowles)
Viktoria Schmid, born in Neuhofen an der Ybbs, Austria in 1986, lives and works in Vienna.
More images
1. Viktoria Schmid, The Clouds Are Not Like Either One – They Do Not Keep One Form Forever, bb15 exhibition view, photo by Patrick Anthofer.
2. Viktoria Schmid, The Clouds Are Not Like Either One – They Do Not Keep One Form Forever, bb15 exhibition view, photo by Patrick Anthofer.
3. Viktoria Schmid, The Clouds Are Not Like Either One – They Do Not Keep One Form Forever, film still, photo by Viktoria Schmid.
4. Viktoria Schmid, The Clouds Are Not Like Either One – They Do Not Keep One Form Forever, Pinacoteca exhibition view, photo by Viktoria Schmid.
5. Viktoria Schmid, The Clouds Are Not Like Either One – They Do Not Keep One Form Forever, Slow Down! exhibition view, photo by Claudia Rohrauer.
Reference
Esther Urlus, Re:Inventing the Pioneers: Film Experiments on Handmade Silver Gelatin Emulsion and Color Methods, (self-published, 2013).