Painting With Light in Caracas, Venezuela

Painting With Light was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela on 27 September 2013. The project brought May’s live video-mapping approach into an international exhibition context, using projected moving image, built form, and custom software to create an environment that shifted continuously between installation, sculpture, and light-based performance.

What matters in this body of work is the way ordinary structures become unstable under projection. Light does not simply decorate the surface. It redefines how the object is read, turning temporary arrangements into something spatial, rhythmic, and difficult to fix in a single image. That instability gives the work its tension, holding material presence and digital transformation together at the same time.

Shown in Caracas, the project extended May’s wider concern with how technical systems change perception and alter the status of what is seen. Rather than using projection as spectacle, Painting With Light asks how quickly a familiar object can become uncertain once image, space, and duration begin to overlap.

The British Council arranged for May to run a two-day Painting With Light workshop at the museum, opening with a public talk before teaching participants the software. Working in groups, they created a large-scale video-mapped sculpture — built on packing crates that had just returned from a touring exhibition of Venezuelan art — which opened to the public on the evening of the second day as the finale of a month-long series of digital art events.

Acknowledgements

• Arranged and facilitated by the British Council, with thanks to Andreína Gómez
• Initial invitation and British Council liaison: Ionee Waterhouse
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Caracas, with thanks to Auramarina Lazarde
• The installation was visited by the British Ambassador, Catherine Nettleton, and the Director of the British Council in Venezuela

Watch the workshop documentation