The Orange Room

Claudia Hart The Orange Room, 2019 Video (color, sound) 5 min, loop Edition of 4 Expanding on early twentieth-century still-life painting from the School of Paris, Hart was inspired by the significant collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and her work there with SAIC media art students, in dialog with both the canonical Art Institute still-lives and its Chair of 19th and 20th Century Painting and Sculpture, the art historian Gloria Groom. In the context of our post-digital moment, Hart imports the compositional structures and “aspect ratios” of the red paintings by Henri Matisse to propose a paradigm shift in painting practice, creating monumental animations at real-painting scale. Like Matisse, Hart has constructed animated images-within-images, as architectures open onto windows and doors that in turn open onto simulated landscapes and rooms bestowed with animated paintings, carpets, and wallpapers. Hart has here constructed digital, pictorial clockworks in which wheels within wheels turn at different rates and temporal schemes to mesmerize viewers, ushering them into a state of contemplation. Hart thinks of these pieces as antidotes to a world in crisis as it transits culturally from the traditional, stable and fixed idea of photographic capture encapsulated by the fixed, frozen photographic moment, into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations. The Machines for Thinking series portrays environments in which time is fluid and elastic, in constant flux and multi-directional, where all is in motion and mutable though nothing is actually happening. This is a different notion of time, an unstable present, in which viewers may experience through the possibility of simulation-technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future, and present into a perpetual now.