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Blue Sky lights up The Merc
The eight tall arched windows of the empty Merc building, fronting on East Third Street, were anything but blank and dark on Monday night, Aug. 2.
A visitation led by Lenka Novak, one of the visiting artists in Dayton’s 2010 Blue Sky Project, effectively transformed them into frames for layered light, shadow, captured images and live motion.
“If this was New York, there would be 5,000 people out here,” said Victoria Theatre Association president and CEO Ken Neufeld, one of a couple dozen onlookers for the lightly advertised presentation.
The show ranged from eerie to goofy. The spooky essence was contained in projections of the nine students Novak has been working with for the past several weeks. She dressed them all in white and photographed them in a totally dark space, an exercise in “negative light.”
Those projected images looked at times like ghosts advancing toward or retreating from the onlookers. A slight hint of menace could be found in uncertainty. Who or what were these not-quite solid beings? There was also a wistful feeling connected to seeing spirits floating about in an abandoned building.
The playful sense came when the students intersected with their photographic versions to cast black shadows on the paper projection screens that covered the windows. The students danced, became giants as they moved toward the glaring white light of the slide projectors across the room, or shrank to Lilliputian dimensions when they moved farther from it.
Novak, a Czech artist based in Montreal, presented “I Am the Light,” a different installation earlier in the month. She beamed photos and videos of the students, along with kaleidoscopic images, onto the blank, white ceiling of the University of Dayton chapel, then had the students interact by creating a layer of moving shadows with their hands in the light.
Blue Sky includes several other visiting artists in various disciplines. The project will conclude with a final exhibition from 5 to 10 p.m. Friday and 6 to 10 Saturday, Aug. 6 and 7, at The Armory, 201 E. Sixth St., part of the First Friday Art Hop. There will be a preview party there starting at 6:30 on Thursday, Aug. 5.
For more, go to www.blueskydayton.org.
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