Shadow Landings
Videos
In the Belly of the Architect: Anthony Viscardi and Tim Higgins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfA39MBsSFY
Links
Allentown Art Museum: https://www.allentownartmuseum.org/exhibitions/past/anthony-viscardi-shadow-landings/
The Morning Call: https://www.mcall.com/2016/11/13/shadow-landings-at-allentown-art-museum-artist-anthony-viscardi-plays-with-shadows-and-light/
Documentary of the exhibition “Shadow Landings”
An immersive art commission from the Allentown Art Museum
November 2016 - March 2017
Foreword
Generated from time-based interactions during three periodic intervals of day – morning, noon, and night – the ephemeral play of shadows is made static through sequential tracings that collapse space and time into one singular composite drawing, a ‘shadow map’ from which new iterations of the shadow may be formed in answer to my theoretical enquiry, ‘If an object can cast a shadow, can a shadow cast an object?’
Danielle Rago, curator and writer on contemporary art, architecture, and design, eloquently describes a recent exhibition, Tracing Time to Measure Space, saying:
These drawings effectively liberate the idea of architecture from its professional constraints to allow for a different perspective on making, one that is independent of digital equations and computer-driven aesthetics, and unencumbered by the practical considerations of translating from two dimensions to three-dimensional space. Released from its formal contract with the object, the shadow now has an independent life and functions as the mediator between the realms of the real and imagined, static and dynamic, visible and invisible. The phenomenological qualities of light and the effects it produces through the shadow become the elusive generators of form and ultimately the structure or organizing principle for three-dimensional invention. (Essay: Mediating Between Realities in the exhibition catalog, Tracing Time to Measure Space, 2013)
In essence, my creative practice makes way for collaborative dialogue between one’s formal imagination, ideating concepts, and its manifest material imagination, “mediating between realities” in order to bring an idea into the world to interact with the public.
My most recent artwork, Shadow Landings, commissioned by the Allentown Art Museum and currently on exhibit through March 26, 2017, was designed to engage the community in which I worked and fellow artists with whom I collaborated.
This paper and presentation on the development of this large-scale three-dimensional work endeavors to illustrate how collaborative creativity can generate opportunities for improvisational decisionmaking in the artistic process and ways creative collaboration can build bonds within the community.
