Multiple attendees muttered something about an acid trip.
The monoliths reflect parts of the walls back on themselves, allowing for audience members to stare into multiple depths of paintings at once. Olive trees and wheat fields moved toward and away from the audience like live creatures. I walked through the rooms, past and through and sometimes into landscapes, still lifes, portraits of others, and self-portraits, all breathtaking and all swirling into one another. Then again the memories would fade like the reverse process of a polaroid camera, and then again we’d be transported to another point in Van Gogh’s life and artistic journey. Brush strokes and detail and color would fade into darkness, momentary glitches of images would flash, and then, color would build up again and we’d be transported to the quiet and dark scenes of potato eaters in Nuenen, Netherlands. The projections oscillated from one to another, color slowly building up across the canvas of the walls to reveal Van Gogh’s sunflowers–that memorable yellow. When it was over, I just about ran out of that office, sobbing and worried I had somehow messed up my own eye because of my anxiety in the procedure.įlies in Immersive Van Gogh Chicago | Photo by Nathaniel Fishburn The specialist would tell me to keep looking left, but I wasn’t sure where “left” was anymore. The moments when I could not see anything at all, except an oppressive white light. The jarring pain that came with each point of the laser. A bright green light shining in and out of different corners of my eye. What happened next I have tried my best to forget, but it always comes back in my dreams. The specialist repeated the process of the procedure, and then in I went. I squinted at the lights around me, moving from room to room. The assistants to the doctor explained the procedure and dilated my eyes.
I went to a retinal specialist on referral from my optometrist. For a moment, I panic, and then refocus these were the insects that flew around him as he sat outside amongst the plants, swatting away and trying to convey what was in front of him. The show does not begin at the start of Van Gogh’s life, but somewhere in the middle, where flies fly from wall to wall and he is swatting away at insects. I looked up at the tall ceiling, the expanse of the room that dipped into a labyrinth who could feel small here? My photographer talked of composition, of breaking up the room so it wouldn’t feel so small. It’s February and I’m wandering around the grandiose hall of the Lighthouse Art Space, wondering what three mirrored versions of the 2001 Space Odyssey monoliths were doing scattered through the room. “If you start seeing floaters, what looks like small flies or gnats, give us a call immediately,” my doctor said to me. So it wouldn’t tear any further across my retina. Trying to reduce my panic, she explained that all it would require was a routine, laser eye procedure to cauterize the hole. My visit to the optometrist proved to be a more terrifying encounter: my doctor found a hole in my retina. I figured this was as a result of the pandemic (and oh, fine, age), that it was normal. Going through my doctor’s visits–the dentist, the gyno, the dermatologist–everything in my body seemed to be a little worse for wear. La nuit étoilée (Starry Night, 1889) in Immersive Van Gogh Chicago | Photo by Nathaniel Fishburn
0 kommentar(er)
