The Boulevard

Ghosh was featured last month at Steve Turner Contemporary across the street from LACMA with his room-sized video installation titled Ordinary Paradise. Rather than viewing a projected image, with darkness relegated to the edges, Ordinary Paradise instead situates a black void front and center, with a narrow band of imagery - waves at the bottom, sky at the top - framing the central emptiness. Initially, it's hard to know where to look. Where's the picture? And why can you only see small bits of the image? The sounds of waves lapping and birds squawking gradually helped create a more immersive environment, and eventually, the waves at the bottom of the screen seemed to be rippling across the floor, and the seagull that sweeps down from above felt physically present in the room.

Ghosh is interested in precisely this kind of disorientation. "This piece came out of a series of explorations in which I projected a line on a wall where it looks like a cut into the wall, but using light," he explains from Toledo, where he now teaches at the Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Toledo. "I like creating a sense of confusion between what's inside and what's outside," he continues.

Ghosh shot the imagery for the installation at the Santa Monica Pier, a place he visited frequently while living here. "The ocean in this case is this natural space, and the urban space is inside, in the gallery, and together they create a third space in the perception of the viewer, who completes the image with his or her imagination."

The attention to the project's specificity extends beyond its location in the city to the very precise measurements of gallery space itself. "We're used to seeing video art simply slapped onto a wall, like a painting," says Ghosh. "However, I wanted to have a spatial relation to the gallery space."

With The Boulevard, Ghosh will play once more with perception, in this case using a circular projection showing people walking along Hollywood Boulevard. The site is less specific than with Ordinary Paradise, and Ghosh will have far less control. However, the project points to the adventurous programming of the HollyWould festival as a whole, which promises to be an explosive event.

the details:
The Boulevard, video installation
LA Freewaves: HollyWould
Hollywood Boulevard
October 9 - 13, 2008
http://www.freewaves.org/