Afterthoughts following the panel discussion for Colin Martin’s digital installation The Garden at the Broadcast Gallery, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).
7th June, 2012, 3.30pm; after the panel discussion...
Colin Martin’s The Garden is made up of a quadrangle of space buttressed by four freestanding walls with missing corners: the viewer enters the space through the lost angles. Up high on the gallery walls proper four projectors buzz, projecting four images onto the interior faces of the mid-height false walls. One long panning shot of a garden at night runs for the full duration of the video installation while the remaining videos project details of garden vegetation and the lighting mechanics for staging The Garden. The long panning shot is a constant crutch for the viewer and allows a certain amount of play to take place amongst the other projections, which intermittently switch on-off like the ’80s electronic memory game ‘Simon’. While forced to wait for the projections to start over during what felt like an eternal 2 minute intermission, the technology behind the projections became more apparent: digitised counters on the DVDs took on a new significance.
Knowing that Martin was/is a representational painter I read The Garden through the eyes of a painter. The tenebrist lighting, weedy vegetation, black backdrop and instances of intimate detail evoked the painting and printed gestures of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Dürer: nature and religion being venerated by the god-given creative hand. But what painting can’t do is sound, which Martin plays with to no end. The projectors in situ and alien mechanics that bring The Garden to life at night ironically sound like the natural and mechanical noises that inhabit a garden in daylight: Martin’s panning camera becomes a lawnmower, a strimmer, a gnat in the ear.
