In the last 10 years, dozens of murals, walking tours, festivals and national commissions have turned Charlotte into a city of talking walls. Now, with help from a red 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, a pair of artists is experimenting with light to make murals move.
Mark Doepker and Rebecca Lipps call it the Eyelumination Project. Five months ago they sculpted an eye around a projector, using scrap plywood, aluminum, Lexan, steel and paint. Then they mounted it on the Volkswagen.
Since then, they’ve been animating murals on the walls of buildings, trains, semi-truck trailers and other objects. It’s an ephemeral experience, and to see it happen you need to be in the right place at the right time.
The easiest place is a pop-up art exhibition, which they flag on their Instagram account. They’ll be at the ArtPop Street Gallery at Le Meridien Hotel on South McDowell at 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, and at Free Range Brewing on North Davidson on the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 29.
Lipps and Doepker say projections are an intriguing evolution of stationary murals. Projections are ideal for events and spaces, Lipps explains, because they can be put up and taken down quickly without permanent impact or damage.
“Projection is also light,” Lipps said. “I've painted murals and projected on top of murals to bring the mural to life and to make the mural seem like it's moving. People have more of a connection to it, when you see an image that becomes a video right before your eyes.”
Challenges
There’s not a lot of money yet in mural projections. Lipps’ day job is teaching art at Springfield Middle School in Fort Mill, South Carolina. She has also served as the chairperson of Charlotte’s Talking Walls mural festival. Doepker is a machinist in his day job. But they get psychic rewards from what Doepker describes as the most close-knit and supportive community of artists he’s ever experienced.
Global light festivals
Globally, holiday-inspired light festivals now frequently feature projected murals, including the Fête des Lumières in Lyon, France, and Luci d'Artista in Torino, Italy. Multiple organizations create holiday light displays in the Charlotte area. Companies including BMW, Disney and Samsung also use city light projections for advertising.
The Beetle attracts its own stories
Like a bat-signal, projections alert people that something big is happening, and Doepker and Lipps use the project to create visibility for other artists.
In September, at the Charlotte International Arts Festival in Ballantyne’s Backyard, they projected a kaleidoscopic tribute to a performance of luminous birdmen staged by a Dutch street theater company.
In another September event called “Rise of the Machines” at the Divine Barrel brewery in NoDa, they collaborated with artists who, among other things, created an art vending machine.
A red vintage Beetle attracts attention and stimulates viewers to tell their own stories, Doepker said. Sometimes, what the project does next results from talking to people near the Beetle.
“Public interaction is another great part about doing a project like this. You never know who you're going to run into at one of these things,” Doepker said. “And this car was built as the people’s car. ... Tons of people have different stories because they made them for so long. It might have been their first car, or they learned how to drive in one, or their mom had one. Or it’s their mom's dream car.”
Why it’s important
“Transforming buildings is what projected murals can do, which is animating and giving kinetic energy to the structure of architecture,” said Mike Wirth, a muralist and art professor at Queens University of Charlotte.
Projected murals started in the 1970s and 1980s, Wirth said, with work by Krzysztof Wodiczko, continuing in the 1990s with Jenny Holzer and in the early 2000s with the Graffiti Research Lab.
Projected murals and other media art have shown up in Charlotte in the last decade, Wirth said, and one of the distinctive characteristics of work by Doepker and Lipps is the attention to the projector itself. The eye sculpture, for example, reminds him of the dream sequence created by Salvador Dali in the 1945 Alfred Hitchcock movie “Spellbound.” The way the red Volkswagen creates interaction is remarkable, he said.
“Who doesn’t have a Beetle story who’s over the age of 45?” Wirth asked.
Students Sam Earley and Joe Wilwerding contributed to this story.
April Little is a student in the James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte, which provides the news service in support of local community news.