Shadow Play 2012
Children’s Museum
Torrington, CT
Photographic Duraclears
30’ x 40’
In response to Torrington’s history and the potential of its future visionaries, the multi-sited “Shadow Play”, an artwork commissioned for the new Children Museum on Main St., highlights the nature of play as a creative activity.
The title “Shadow Play,” is a contextual as well as visual riff on the name of the museum, “Kids at Play.” Silhouetted figures housed in the windows of a luminescent wall attached to the front of the museum, are manipulated images of Torrington children holding translucent spheres inside of which are photographs of landscapes surrounding Torrington. These encapsulated "worlds" that the children seem to be playing with refer to the town's present and future. The children are viewing into a suggested “magical” crystal ball, as if to see all the wonder of the present and all the promise of what lies before them.
On the actual windows on the building behind the attached wall panel, and in back of the transparent photographs of the children, are translucent photographic images of the Warner Theatre costume designers at work. In this spatial interplay between the implied and actual windows, there are more aspects of the word "play", but now its adults at creative work on "plays". Behind these photographs of the designers, will be the actual designers whose movement back and forth, especially during the evening when preparing for an upcoming production, create another kind of kinetic shadow play.
