Here were some of the artistic displays captured into image format from the New Frontier art space at Sundance. To encompass new art forms besides film, the festival invites genre-defying and contemporary visual artists to create innovative displays or site-specific installations that complement the cinematic programming.
The most high-profile display in the mix was actor James Franco’s installation of a deconstructed living room set from “Three’s Company”. His dryly irreverent take of the TV sitcom called Three’s Company: The Drama strips away any essence of the comedy and redubs the dialogue with dramatic overtone. Viewers were invited to sit on a couch or stand in a sparsely decorated living room set and immerse themselves with projected images of the show onto the wall. It became a disorienting experience after the first few minutes. The sardonic humor of the once-funny dialogue quickly wore thin as Franco’s dry delivery of it became monotonous.
Other fascinating displays were seen throughout the space which was housed at Park City’s historic Miner’s Hospital building. Spanish artist Daniel Canogar recycles electronic media to resurrect lost images onto a multidimensional space. One of his pieces, Spin, has him hang an array of old DVD’s like sculptural ornaments and project “lost” images onto them. Canogar’s second entry, Hippocampus 2, is a unique energy burst of illumination on multicolored wires. In ordinary light, it is just a tangled mess of electric refuse. But when a light burst sweeps through, the display becomes a highly charged static cyclone filled with the information particles circulating to its destination. Squidsoup’s Glowing Pathfinder Bugs has the participant play with digitized critters in a sandbox. Getting in touch with your inner child, Squidsoup uses interactive projections and sensors for the bugs to detect crevices, mounds and participants’ hands to crawl, squirm and fall back onto the sand.
Always worth the side visit, Sundance’s New Frontier art installations are a welcome reprieve from the crowd-mongering mobs and touché celebrity entourages those festival film premieres can bring.
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