Title: Primaries.
Media: 3 Channel Video Installation.
Year: 2008.
Exhibited:
Performers: Nina Gaglio, Rich Logan, Sara Thompson.
Special Thanks: Constance DeJong, The Dorsch Gallery, Martin Murphy, Carlos Rigau, and Nari Ward
Primaries is a digital video installation of three circular projections, each seven and a half feet tall. The circles rotate like slowly spinning disks, erratically gaining and losing momentum, to the churning sounds of echoing fans and throbbing motors. Their edges are aligned to lightly graze against each other and the floor, creating a sensation of friction. The projections are hyper-saturated in red, yellow, and blue, after the three Primary Colors. Each circumscribes a distorted figure who could, with weightless movements, be floating in amniotic fluid or writhing in a Petri dish. The footage is edited to counteract the physical activity of the performers, working against expectations of gravity and momentum. Without the physics of an objective world, the corporeal actions of these figures propel them in a light-filled subjective space.
Primaries crosses a fundamental of the digital world with a fundamental of the analog world. In terms of color alone, it is true that the digital world is a world of light. The additive color model creates every digital color by mixing three colors of light: Red, Green, and Blue, a lucid triad known as RGB. By contrast, color in the analog world is a matter of mixing measured quantities of stuff, be it deep dyes or powdery pigments. In one model of the subtractive color process, the formative, fundamental colors, from which all others can be mixed, are Red, Yellow, and Blue. These three are called Primary Colors. Primaries superimposes these systems onto one another, like opposing worldviews.