Shadow Scribes, 2018

Digital Ink Jet Prints and Video

I am particularly interested in the premises beginning with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, (375 BCE) in which shadows represented false visions or illusions of reality and in Pliny the Elder’s assertion that the shadow exists as a magical substitute for a person’s presence (Natural History, 79 CE), that the capture of a shadow is a capture of (one’s) vital essence.  These ideas inform the ideation for a longer term project that would revisit and reanimate Southwestern US Pueblo Indian creation and other stories featuring animal, human and celestial symbology.  I envision the project as a series of live performances including shadow projections of animated symbols represented in the petroglyphs and pictographs at Chaco accompanied by narration of the stories by a storyteller associated with a descendant or affiliated tribe. I imagine the projected shadows as forms that can be regarded as interpretations or re-vistations of the carved and painted static symbology of the rock art and intend the shadows to move in accordance with the storytellers’ direction.

These images are prototypes, the result of concept tests in studio constructed scenics using backlit prints of cliff faces of the canyon and dwelling walls with plastic animals as the objects to create shadows.