MULTI-MEDIA INSTALLATIONS
Developing museum exhibitions, including story development, exhibitry, and all visual and interactive media, is the world I come from. It is a world that is dependent on, but often overlooked by, visual artists. And it is one that enables your work to be seen by not hundreds or a few thousand people, but literally millions. Well over 10 million people annually visit the exhibitions we created for such institutions as the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Mount Vernon, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and the Old Faithful Visitor Center at Yellowstone National Park. These works can be viewed at www.ccadesign.com. A few images are included here.
In that earlier work, we believed that the failure of schools and museums in teaching history and science was their reliance on facts and artifacts and the loss of the power of storytelling . We embraced a model that used a story-based experiential foundation, established the context of the story through theatrical sets and layered and interactive media, and positioned artifacts as windows to these stories. We recognized that in exhibition design the audience occupies the stage, they look at what they choose to look at in a sequence of their choosing. Their focus may be on the foreground, mid-ground or background. This work has influenced my photography. I’ve been referred to as a “visual storyteller”. And it’s been noted that my photographs sometimes border on chaos and contain multiple stories but that I somehow find an organizing element seemingly at he last second. Both are results of my beliefs and background.