Julie Anand: Itinerant Camera Obscura in Dispersal/Return

Julie Anand's Itinerant Camera Obscura will be exhibited as part of the LAND/ART project at the UNM Art Museum's Dispersal/Return

She describes the work with the following words:
"The body is an environment defined by a permeable membrane. We constantly exchange materials with our surroundings, breathing the air that others breathe, drinking the water that flows within other bodies and systems. Light from our surroundings pours in through our eyes and shadows dance around inside our skulls upside-down: Inside and outside in dialogue, not dichotomy.

Viewers are invited to sit inside this tent, which acts as a camera obscura, or ‘darkened room’. This work is inspired by science fair wonder, by Plato’s cave, and by utopian desires for small bands of people to share a mind’s eye for a quiet spell."

Her explanation for the images and process are, "Viewers enter and, after their eyes adjust to the darkness, find images of the exterior courtyard projected onto a screen at the back of the dark tent. The tent serves as a laboratory for enjoying your own system of vision along with others. I bought a cheap tent and took it apart. I used those pieces as a pattern to make a new tent out of nylon darkroom cloth and Tyvec UV Soft Structure. Double-seam sewing methods work for light just as well as they usually do for water. Here the rainfly becomes a heat resistant 'sunfly'. My eye doctor ground down a lens for the tent's focal length for me and I used an altered 35mm plastic film canister to seat the lens."