Stratachrome Green

Stratachrome Green is a monumental panoramic artwork that fills the viewer’s field of vision with a luminous expanse of overlapping bodies, symbols, objects and imagery.

Spriggs coined the term stratachrome from the Latin strata, meaning layers, and the Greek chroma, meaning colour. It describes both the physical layering of colour and the accumulation of meanings within it. In Stratachrome Green, these layers bring together contemporary associations of green with media, perception and power.

The installation uses the specific chroma key green employed in filmmaking to replace selected areas of an image with other content. Here, this normally replaceable colour becomes impossible to overlook. Its unnatural intensity and holographic appearance suggest a reality already transformed into an image. Green becomes a symbol of a condition in which media continually replaces what we see, and our access to reality is shaped by its representations.

Spriggs’ thinking at the time drew on Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacra and simulation, in which representations come to construct what is experienced as real. He was also interested in Paul Virilio’s analysis of how the speed of technology collapses distance, bringing remote events into an immediate present and transforming our experience of space.

Images of bodily, erotic and military power overlap, bringing different forms of desire and control into relation. Two dimensional imagery coexists with three dimensional forms, while blurred edges sit beside topographical structures. These different ways of constructing an image complicate the distinction between a depicted surface and a body occupying space.

The viewer must walk around the entire installation to compare its forms and discover relationships between them. Vision remains fragmented: what becomes legible from one position is obscured or transformed from another. Individual images invite attention, yet their accumulation produces an overwhelming, almost blinding field of green. As imagery and meaning blur together, the work questions whether seeing more brings us closer to reality, or surrounds us with further representations.

Created during Spriggs’ residency at Galerie de l’UQAM.