Project Descriptions (artist statements)

Vietnam Projects

Ha Noi Windows

Larry and his wife Pam arrived in Ha Noi for the first time in October 2006 to work in a three month long artist residency program at Campus Ha Noi. Within several weeks they had befriended many of their Vietnamese colleagues, most of them graduates of Ha Noi's University of Fine Arts. The point of the residency was to work in a collaborative effort with the Vietnamerse artists and to produce wiork that might employ multi media or cross discipline results.

Ha Noi Windows was the product of two months of collaboration between Pam and Larry and Le Huy Hoang, a painter, and Vu Nhat Tan, a composer. The point was to provide a visual/aural three dimensional experience that combined East - West feelings.

Viewers are encouraged to experience the music, photographs, and light shadows on the wall as they walk through the structure. The tubes can be any strong stiff materia though in previous exhbits it has been bamboo l. Viewers are encouraged to move dance-like bending and twisting through the structure. In this way they are also incorporated into the expression of the installation.

The photograph subjects were a result of Hoang and Larry prowling Ha Noi at night with Hoang pointing out things that had a strong personal symbolism for his feelings about his city. Larry then wanrted to capture those subjects in a metaphorical manner. Hoang also decided how the photographs should be edited to restrict the visual material to their essential outlines.

The blackened transparent photographs are made on printer's litho material which flex and twist in a slight wind that sweeps through the installation. This causes the shadows on the walls to move in interesting varied patterns. The photos also reflect the galleriy spotlights as white out areas in the blackness of the image's surfaces. The idea being they are a metaphor for how human thought and memory work as an incandescent experience.

Hoang and Larry recorded street sounds including their own voices while photographing. Vu Nhat Tan and Pam took those sounds and some improvised violin riffs and collaborated on the creation of an experimental sound track. It plays continuusly within the installation. The sound composition is an indirect reference to the feelings produced by cooperation between people from different cultural origins.

To date, (Feb. -2010), Ha Noi Windows has been exhibited in Ha Noi in 2006 and near Milano, Italia in 2007.