DREAMBOAT DIRTBLOCK is made between a lever and lens. Compressed blocks of soil extracted from NYC building foundation pits, curing to maximum hardness throughout the duration of the exhibition sit next to fragmented images of a boat, itself a toppled skyscraper.
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LENS crystallizes snapshots of this ‘smoke test’ into light shaping surfaces. Milled shards of a shattered Plexiglas sheet filter the light from a single LED: gathering it into an image through sheer surface variation. These projections are physically identical to rippled patterns refracted onto surfaces adjacent to water on a sunny day. The computational reconstruction and control of this phenomenon is being developed as a method of optical watermarking. While the movement of water and light are technically the guiding principle, in optics this phenomenon is referred to as a “caustic” projection, a word whose original meaning is “to burn.”
This exhibition by Sam Lewitt ran January 16 - February 23, 2020 at the Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York City. Rayform created the LENS shards of the exhibition, which was a highly challenging task given their complicated shard-like outlines and detailed imagery.
