Visitors will enter the darkened space of Dawson City's Curling Rink to experience Doug Smarch Jr.'s Harvest. Wearing 3D glasses they will see two wall tents flooded with projected imagery and an illusion of water seemingly flowing across the gravel floor. For Smarch the imagery is, in part, about his ancestral Yukon home and the landscape's changing history, and, in part, about his personal spiritual quest. Smarch speaks of the ephemeral qualities of his 3D projections as "ray tracing," akin to light steaming through trees. In such terms Smarch's desired effect is reminiscent of what Athanasius Kircher, an early theorist and practitioner of cameras obscura had to say of light rays, and of the "world of light and shadow" that is the domain of the camera obscura.

 

(Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, qtd in: Glassine, John. A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012, 116)

SMARCH

The Camera Obscura Project brings together an international group of artists and other researchers interested in cameras obscura, related optical phenomenon and the meeting places of: art and science, cultural and wilderness settings, learning and play. With funding from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada the Project is based at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, B.C.