Slight Shifts
An installation at the Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford. May 29 - August 1 2004 .
Fotonet-South is very pleased to be a partner of the inaugural International Oxford Brookes/Pitt Rivers Museum Fine Art Visiting Fellowship. Fotonet-South played a crucial part in enabling the making of this spectacular light installation and present this online exhibition as a photographic record.
Introduction:
This project aims to respond to and intervene into Pitt Rivers Museum as a space - one that is dark, cluttered, spooky, full of magical surprises and curiosities, and harking back to a by gone era. It is literally a huge cabinet containing hundreds of glass vitrines that are in turn filled with thousands of objects drawn from many different cultures and spanning over centuries. This is the image that has come to represent the museum, fondly etched in the public’s imagination.
It is a space profoundly loaded with signs and meanings and, in many ways, to attempt to create a work that is again resonant with meaning would be trivial. “slight shifts” attempts to shift the way the museum and collections are seen by introducing two seemingly neutral elements: light and colour. They function as counterpoints, reintroducing and transforming the experience a museum visit of viewing the collections.
Visitors will be walking on corridors of light filtering from below through the cast-iron grating of the underground gullies, bathing them and the artefacts in coloured light. A case of silver lost in the dark clutter and a hundred oars and paddles suspended above our heads will be lit up in soft glows as we unknowingly walk by. The unnoticed ceiling opens up into a sky of blue every now and then. The experience is made physical. The past is made contemporary.