Her work is very emotion-based and personal, "If I have a good time when I'm making an image, I notice people react to it differently [when they see it]" "If I'm stressed or upset, they get something else." This should help with my own project as I am trying to explore experiences and emotions and need to understand how people would react to different types of projections.
Living in a Painting, 2019
Living in a Painting is a series of multiple exhibitions that take somewhat different formats such as full on shows (installations, performance, music), projections onto public spaces, live painting performances, and solely projection and/or photography exhibitions. All these exhibitions display the same work however Rochat chooses to display or express these works in different ways possibly dependent on the space, which conveys the importance of the space for the exhibition as this is its format. I will be focusing on the final and most recent exhibition, Living in a Painting: The Heat is on that was an interactive exhibition and then closing performance that was performed in a few spaces, including Tate Modern.
Her aim with these exhibitions is to interact with her exhibitions or have her visitors interact to "create a moving, contemplative collage; allowing the mutating image to reflect a world in a permanent flux."
The Exhibition Space
Die Mobiliar Direktion in Bern, Switzerland
The setup of the exhibition space is covered in large print outs of Rochat's paintings - sometimes covering the whole wall as wallpaper, sometimes just large or small scale prints, or sometimes the original painting. Rochat aims to use larger exhibition spaces to show this variation and also create fully immersive rooms such as the space covered in large scale prints and cushions covered in the same prints to encourage visitors to lie down and actively engage with the exhibition.
Interactivity
What was particularly interesting about her exhibition in Die Mobiliar is that Rochat encouraged visitors to bring their own scissors or use the ones provided to cut off the prints on the floor to further explore the idea of an interactive and ever changing space - the cutting of paper reflects the idea of this being a collage.
The projections are of her own paintings once again as being exhibited in the space however the large scale projections allow the visitor to be much more immersed as it occupies the whole space and creates a more dream-like atmosphere which could represent the mental space that the viewer would be in when experiencing the projections. There is also a collage effect which Rochat focuses on and it emphasises the content of the work by layering the textures and communicating the emotions she wants to be communicated.
The visibility of the projector also allows me to consider the practicality of carrying my own projections out - I have to consider where my projections would be placed and whether I want them to be intrusive, how far away my projector is from the wall (which affects the size) and how many projectors I need to cover the space.
On a specific day, Rochat creates a performance at her exhibition which involves moving projections and a DJ set. The performance is extremely effective as the moving images along with the music curated for the show fully immerse the audience in an atmosphere controlled by Rochat, which allows her to communicate what she wanted the audience to understand.
The overlapping images continue this collage effect, and provide more impact than still images/projections as it allows for more thought into how the animation and the movement and direction etc affect the atmosphere.
The only format consideration if I were to carry out a similar performance to my exhibition is that the projections would have to be manually controlled by me, and the projector used is an overhead projector as she is moving the acetate images herself to create a much more organic and honest performance.
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