This work assumes the appearance of a slide projection. As the slides turned over in the carousel they seem to melt and burn up under the light from the projector.
The photographs were taken from the disastrous Second World War campaigns in Barbarossa where many lives were lost to the onslaught of fire or the bitter cold.
I projected the slides in a film projector and left them to burn and melt. I filmed this process and edited the footage to simulate a slide carousel projection, accompanied by the appropriate sound effects.
This footage was then projected onto ground glass plates attached to1940’s theatre projection lights.
Joseph Wright of Derby made a painting of an early scientific experiment with an air pump. The purpose of the experiment was to see if life was possible in a vacuum. Wright paints a bird trapped inside a glass bell jar surrounded by a small family who respond in various ways to the event of the dying life. The older men are scientifically enthralled while the young girl cries.
Collishaw remade this scenario by filming a canary and then projecting the video back inside a bell jar on a ground glass screen. The viewer comes and goes, but the canary is trapped, condemned to hop around for eternity.
The video of an English oak is projected into a camera glass negative carrier.
Despite the many depictions of Christ crucified in existence, Collishaw wasn’t aware of there being any images that actually covered a period of time, where the shivers and spasms of the tortured body were evident.
The crucifixion to us is an emblem without movement. Collishaw wanted to create an image more faithful to the real event; replacing the poise of a human statue with the troubling sight of a man in the throes of death.
By projecting looped video footage of himself, crucified and twitching, Collishaw introduced time as a vital aspect of this iconic scene.
After reading about another missing child, Collishaw started work on Ganymede. He projected a video of a boy being snatched by an eagle onto smoke emitting from an old gothic font. As the smoke emerged and waned the image of the child and his captor appeared and disappeared tauntingly.