Display/Desire
2007/2010
Photographic installation: two 35mm Kodak slide projectors, two carousels with twenty black-and-white images on a loop, four sheets of Plexiglas (two red and two semi-transparent white, 48 x 60 in. each) and handmade projector unit.
“Display, Desire is a photographic installation composed of suspended Plexiglas panels (either red or semi-transparent white) that become screens for projected images and the backdrop of our own reflections. Carousels of slides are timed to project onto the Plexiglas panels, suggesting the repetition of display and desire. As we walk around and through the installation we are integrated into it as our presence is reflected onto the Plexiglas, yet our ephemeral images cannot be fixed. Our absence then becomes a lost presence. Something or someone is missing, thereby creating the desire for a return to wholeness. The drive to invent photography was fueled in the nineteenth century by the desire to fix the fleeting images viewed through older optical tools such as the camera obscura or camera lucida. The slide/carousel/projector technology has been usurped by PowerPoint as a teaching tool for artists and art historians, reminding us of Marshall McLuhan’s belief that with the invention of any tool, something is gained and something is made obsolete”. Susan Edwards, Executive Director and CEO, Frist Art Museum, “Vesna Pavlović: Projected Histories”, Nashville, 2011
