Stratachrome Green

Stratachrome Green spans the gallery as a luminous, curved panorama. Human bodies, vehicles, weapons, architecture, and abstracted masses gather into a field shaped by the visual languages of military, political, technological, and social power. Chroma key green is normally a temporary background, removed during production so another image can occupy its place. Spriggs reverses that operation. The colour intended to disappear becomes overwhelmingly present, while the fragments placed before it refuse to resolve into a seamless world.

The viewer stands inside the apparatus of image construction rather than before a finished representation. What becomes background, what is isolated, and what is permitted to appear are revealed as decisions rather than neutral facts. Transparency multiplies the imagery but does not clarify it. Bodies and symbols overlap until an excess of visible information approaches opacity. Green operates at once as blank field and saturation, absence and total environment. The work makes mediated power perceptible through the conditions by which images are assembled, substituted, and made credible. Read Marie Ève Beaupré’s exhibition text on Stratachrome.

A montage of power

The panorama does not organise its imagery into a single narrative. Instead, it operates as a montage in which separate temporalities and categories appear simultaneously. Figures cohere from the frontal viewpoint, then separate into planes as the viewer moves. Seeing becomes an act of assembling information.

The scale of the work offers a position of apparent overview, but abundance complicates that authority. The installation makes a large field visible while refusing complete mastery of its contents. Its brightness is inseparable from a condition of visual saturation in which too much information may obscure as readily as it reveals.