be here now

About the Work

Interactive Installation
Feathers, wood, wire, interactive sound and lighting.

Be Here Now is an interactive multimedia installation where viewers are urged to strike the artwork to initiate their own experience in the space.

presentations

Solo Exhibition, Things I Can’t Tell You, Robert Kananaj Gallery 2016, Presented with Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, as part of the Canadian Spotlight Artist Award to Randall Okita
Group Exhibition, AGO Massive Party, Art Gallery of Ontario 2016

project description

Be Here Now is a large-scale interactive installation about the ephemeral nature of ceremony, memory and space.

Upon entering the space the audience is confronted with a large structure that appears to be supporting a bell. The appearance of this structure is a result of a single point-perspective illusion, so that when the audience moves around the structure it becomes apparent that it is an illusion created out of a number of panels of suspended feathers.

Upon reaching the back of the space, the structure appears again and the audience finds a rope with which they can pull back a large wooden mallet to ring the red bell floating in the center of the space.

The ringing of the bell triggers a reaction of sound and light. Through dynamic sound, lighting cues, and the use of projection mapping, the space transforms and depicts an evolution of the seasons.

When I made this project, I was thinking about my mother. I remember conversations with her before I left Calgary. While away I discovered and practiced ceremonies of ringing bells as a request for protection, a gesture of remembrance, memorialization, or as a call to meditation. Making this work years later, after the loss of my mother, I was pursuing the sense that we carry ceremonies and stories, the ability to memorialize and to be present with us all the time.