-
Marie Foulston:
Cavernous halls filled with the projected light of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night folding across every wall. Tall pillars dominate and dissect the space, tiled with the glow of iconic Sunflowers. Double height ceilings dwarf the people below. Nooks, ledges and passageways offer places to perch or wander through and observe the spectacle that surrounds.
On the surface it made sense to me that Van Gogh somehow became the poster child for a certain type of immersive experience in the 2010s. The kind I mean are the ones in which vast repurposed venues are filled with ‘ken burns effect’ transitioning projections of coffee-table book friendly artists. Imagine Van Gogh, Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience, Van Gogh Alive. In name, content, format and venue type these touring shows are almost indistinguishable from each other.
If you’re looking to visually ‘immerse’ a space this way then I guess Van Gogh fits the bill… popular, highly recognisable, colourful bold impressionist visuals, works all handily out of copyright. But the intensely specific coincidence of his projected appearances around the world niggled at me and in a moment of procrastination I found myself typing into the search bar to see if there might be an answer to explain why.
What my time down the google mines taught me was that yes, there is indeed an answer. But what I also learnt was that I had been asking the wrong question in the fist place, because this story isn’t really about the iconic visuals that adorned the walls and floors, instead it is a story about the shape of the spaces themselves.
Tags: vincent-van-gogh art history quarries projection exhibitions immersive experiences