Inspired by street toys, popular display objects and nineteenth-century pre-cinematic devices, Chhachhi has developed the animated lightbox, both device and medium, creating a new artistic language.
This kinetic object uses simple, but ingenious means to build a form of photographic montage created through both still and moving layers. These mobile palimpsests take on a startling dimensionality as a series of translucent and transparent layers merge in and out of each other to create an almost cinematic aesthetic. Further, the movement of the layers within the light box produces a special quality of time, and elicits attentiveness, a sort of contemplative alertness.The images are drawn from a wide range of sources - photographs taken by the artist, spectral satellite data, pre-modern painting, colonial maps – to name a few. These realign photographic indexicality from historical trace to a performative presence that is both dialectical in form and cinematic in effect. Chhachhi slows the viewer down, drawing them into her inquiry into contemporary ecological concerns.
This kinetic object uses simple, but ingenious means to build a form of photographic montage created through both still and moving layers. These mobile palimpsests take on a startling dimensionality as a series of translucent and transparent layers merge in and out of each other to create an almost cinematic aesthetic. Further, the movement of the layers within the light box produces a special quality of time, and elicits attentiveness, a sort of contemplative alertness.The images are drawn from a wide range of sources - photographs taken by the artist, spectral satellite data, pre-modern painting, colonial maps – to name a few. These realign photographic indexicality from historical trace to a performative presence that is both dialectical in form and cinematic in effect. Chhachhi slows the viewer down, drawing them into her inquiry into contemporary ecological concerns.
