Bedfellows explores the dynamics of public/private body relationships by bringing the intimacy of a bed space into the gallery.
Participants were invited to use a private bed in the artist’s studio with a prompt: use this horizontal space to find peace and emotional seclusion. The sessions were untimed, and open-ended in their interpretation of the prompt. These experiences were filmed from a camera positioned over the bed. The same bed was then moved to the gallery, where the video footage of participants was projection mapped onto its surface.
The projected figures move, relax, and rest upon the bed, part documentation and part ghostly presence. We are both unsettled and intrigued by their existence, and our companionship with them. Pixelated and 2-dimensional, they are nonetheless a tangible presence that occupies and claims the space of the bed. The translation from flesh and blood to light is grounded by the constant of the bed space, the site of both human impression and weightless projection. By bringing the unobserved experience of the participants into the gallery their vulnerability suddenly becomes public; an intimacy with the figures on the bed is forced upon viewers. We are left to investigate our emotional response to witnessing their private meditation, finding ourselves their bedfellows.
2017, Bed, sheet, projector