Over the past couple of weeks (from 20 – 29 July, to be precise), Gertrude Street in Fitzroy has been home to a variety of projection art pieces, ranging from hypnotising geometric animations in shop windows to colourful patterns projected onto the entirety of one of the 20-odd story public housing towers. This year saw the fifth Gertrude Street Projection Festival (GSPF), featuring a large number of artists, including a number of collaborative works.
One of my favourite works was on Title Music Film Books, on the corner of Gertrude and George Streets. Titled “Too Busy to be Beautiful” and created by Cam Thompson and Sandra Duncanson, the piece consisted of four cheekily anthropomorphised elements (Earth, Fire, Air and Water) interacting with each other: Water dousing Fire to an ember, Wind fanning him (her?) back to normal, etc. The cool thing about the work was that the shopfront wasn’t just a surface to be projected onto, but part of the ‘space’ of the work itself. For example, the characters would move around the walls of the building but around the windows, as if these were physical obstacles to them. Continue reading
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