Installation VR in TOPO’s Window Display
5445 de Gaspé Ave., Ground floor, suite 107-B
January 18 to February 17, 2018
Opening on Thursday January 18, 5 PM
 
 

Islands can be seen as metaphors for a condensed physical space in which we are constantly aware of the limits and edges of our living environment. By transposing this metaphor to an immersive VR / sculptural installation, the artist invites users to navigate through an archipelago of singular encounters in which their presence fosters meaning through interactions with characters who currently inhabit these imaginary islands.

In Island: Vitrine, Mc Gilchrist will experiment in combining 360 videos shot in Quebec with environments created in 3D, to assess the validity of blending both visual formats productively for a VR experience. She will also be using VR’s embodied experience to re-consider elements of poetry, oral traditions and story telling – which are present across all cultures – within a contemporary screen-based context. In VR, once the user interacts with a character, a series of prompts allows them to combine short lines of text (in English or French), which becomes their collaborative story. Her main source of inspiration stems from the Caribbean, but the project will refer to other traditions, both oral and written-that expand the project’s scope.

Where : TOPO’s Window Display / 5445 de Gaspé Ave. / Ground floor

When : January 18 to February 17, 2018

Opening : Thursday January 18 at 5 PM / Ground floor 107-B

 

   

Born in Jamaica to a French Mother and a Jamaican Father, her family left the island when she was four and she returned to live and work there between 2011-2014. Since then, she is exploring translocation and her mixed European-Caribbean cultural identity across the different spaces she lives and works in. By juxtaposing parallel realities through photographs, video installations and VR, elements of the ‘exotic’ are re-appropriated, and remapped to evoke the complexity of hybrid identities in the ‘new world’. She completed her Master’s in Photography at the London College of Communication in 2010.

She took a Graduate Certificate in Design and Computation Arts In 2014-2015 and she now pursuing the Individualized PhD in Arts, Education and Immersive Technology at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. She is concerned with new forms of immersive visual storytelling and how they function for a creative expression that subverts the reality of racial, social and gender based categorization, classification and discrimination from non-Western spaces like the contemporary Caribbean and it’s global diaspora. I’m inspired by live performance, poetry and water/submersion as immersive platforms on the threshold of contemplative experience and embodied interaction, at the intersection of spaces for high art and popular entertainment. She is drawing on traditional storytelling, YouTube comments, and video installations to design VR experiences and environments where the lines between user experience and co-creation are blurred. The Post colonial experience of dual, hybrid or mixed identities is considered here as a useful framework to examine the debates around the hegemony of a ‘western’ conception of the body, currently confronted with Virtual, Augmented and Mixed realities’ hybrid experiences of presence.