OUTER BODY/INNER EXPERIENCES | Wood Street Galleries | Pittsburgh

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Wood Street Galleries continues to bring the best, most memorable, high-tech installation to the Pittsburgh Arts Community.  It is the gem of the Gallery Crawl, which happens 3 times a year in the cultural district of downtown Pittsburgh.  If you have never been to Wood Street Galleries, let this be your inaugural visit.  These installations are brilliant, and the energy they created in people was amazing to witness!  Which makes this show one of the best  I have seen at Wood Street .  Thank you Murray and your staff for making these amazing shows happen!

First up is Canadian Artist Luc Courchesne demonstrating his work called, “Where are you?”  Visitors steer their way through virtual landscapes stretching around them in all directions.  From within an inverted dome where they are provided with an iPhone to navigate.  They experience immersion and invited to play with the scale of things around them.  “Where are you” uses the Pano-scope 360 invented by Courchesne to simplify the authoring and delivery of visual immersive experiences.

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Next up is Belgium Artist Lawrence Malstaf with “Nemo Observatorium” Styrofoam beads are blown around in a big transparent PVC cylinder by 5 strong fans.  Visitors can their place in the armchair at the middle or observe from the outside.  The chair is the “eye of the storm,” its calm and safe.  Spectacular at first site, this installation turns out to mesmerize like a kind of meditation machine.  One can follow the seemingly cyclic patterns, focus on the different layers of 3D pixels.  One could call it a training device, challenging the visitor to stay centered and find peace in a fast changing environment.

This work was fascinating and it was thrilling to watch the people respond to it, seen here is the Artist Lawrence Malstaf inside his creation.

Check out this quick slide-show of the reactions to this amazing installation.

French Artist Airan Kang fashion books out of fiber optics within plastic cases.  Each text is an immaterial presence in light and color that is future realized in the space of imagination.  Kang’s virutal library was created in homage to the books of philosophers, poets and novelists that are sources of inspiration.

“Shadow for Heisenberg” by Chicago Artist Jim Campbell. Every time viewers approach the case to appease their curiosity or desire for contemplation, the glass fogs up, leaving the viewers frustrated and unable to see the object of desire.

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Lastly, British Artist Mike Stokes “Long After Tonight.”  Long after tonight documents a re-creation of a Northern Soul night staged at St Salvador’s Church in Dundee, Scotland – parts of which housed some of the city’s first dance events of this kind during the early 1970’s. Northern Soul is a term used to describe the dislocation of obscure up-tempo African-American soul music to the north of England during the sixties and seventies. ‘Northern’ nights became extremely popular events where fans gathered in discreet communal places and dance halls for all-night dance sessions.