The Chamber
2020
David Stout
Technical Director - Stephen Lucas
The Chamber is a site-specific video installation in the form of a color laden funerary chamber. This hybrid work, combining architecture, animation and sound, is created as an acknowledgment of our passing through the threshold of mounting loss and existential fear into an era of transformation and renewal. Inspired, in part, by the sacred stone monuments of Neolithic cultures and the funerary chambers of ancient Egypt, The Chamber provides a rainbow marker for the passing of one age into another.
The work utilizes a dozen individual projections designed for the walls of the Dal Park parking garage in Dallas. Within this projected environment there are five additional vertical projected monuments resembling megaliths, dolmens or stelae made from cinder-blocks. The projected imagery centers on the figure of an ornate mothlike form in constant motion, at times transforming into intricate cosmic filigree, at other times fluttering relentlessly within the confines of a translucent cocoon. Taken as a whole, the installation fills the room with multiple figures in a state of perpetual morphosis – transforming and transforming again.
Stout sees his work as an answer to the need for new forms of ceremonial immersion to facilitate acceptance, strength and joy in a moment of loss and mourning.
