by Jodie Keeling

A cluster of people gather at the edge of a room, their necks craned. They are perusing "Loudly Minimal, Quietly Baroque" at the Blue Star in San Antonio. What's caught their attention? "Two Corners-Three Walls," a multiple projection installation by Austin filmmaker Luke Savisky.

Eight 16mm film projectors punctuate the floor of Savisky's installation. None have film threaded through them, though they are all on and running. Precisely pitched to different degrees of incline, each projector throws an accurately tilted beam of light, casting a variety of triangles and squares onto the three flat walls and two corners of the room. All of the shapes overlap along a distinct horizon forming a panoramic image from one wall to the next­like a cubist's mountain range with alternating pockets of constant and pulsing light.

From the left, a large elongated triangle stretches across the wall to crescendo at its base in the corner inside two offset, overlapping squares. The vanishing point, a hot spot, created by the intensity of the three overlapping flickering beams of light, recedes deep into and out from the wall. A pulsing triangle pulls off to the right into the base of another square and lands on the right wall inside the tip of another stretched out triangle.

Two Corners--Three Walls: an installation to experience

To the eye, it appears as though Savisky has carved out razor-sharp recesses from the walls, so hard and defined are the edges. Revealed within are warm, flickering, luminous rooms-wombs. Over time, the hard-soft contrast of the two entertains a play on perspective. A third dimension gapes in and out from the second. Illusory amorphous shapes take form in the flickering recesses, a result of retinal distress. Colors appear, change. Shapes advance and recede. Caverns of pulsing light, articulated by the ambient music (by Stars of the Lid), beckon with warmth­an antidote to the cold, hard-edged gallery-world we are standing in.

No longer does the light seem to come from the projectors on the floor but from a source deep within the walls. Prisms of light extend outward into the room, as if the world were cracking open at Savisky's portals. I want to enter. I want to walk around in a weightless world...a world with no up, no down, no cold hard ground...to feel the light on my skin, drift deep within the infinite luminosity. Will mortal flesh burn from a moment in Savisky's heaven?

A cluster of people gather at the edge of a room, their necks craned. They are perusing Loudly Minimal, Quietly Baroque at the Blue Star in San Antonio. What's caught their attention? "Two Corners-Three Walls," a multiple projection installation by Austin filmmaker Luke Savisky.

Eight 16mm film projectors punctuate the floor of Savisky's installation. None have film threaded through them, though they are all on and running. Precisely pitched to different degrees of incline, each projector throws an accurately tilted beam of light, casting a variety of triangles and squares onto the three flat walls and two corners of the room. All of the shapes overlap along a distinct horizon forming a panoramic image from one wall to the next­like a cubist's mountain range with alternating pockets of constant and pulsing light.

From the left, a large elongated triangle stretches across the wall to crescendo at its base in the corner inside two offset, overlapping squares. The vanishing point, a hot spot, created by the intensity of the three overlapping flickering beams of light, recedes deep into and out from the wall. A pulsing triangle pulls off to the right into the base of another square and lands on the right wall inside the tip of another stretched out triangle.

To the eye, it appears as though Savisky has carved out razor-sharp recesses from the walls, so hard and defined are the edges. Revealed within are warm, flickering, luminous rooms-wombs. Over time, the hard-soft contrast of the two entertains a play on perspective. A third dimension gapes in and out from the second. Illusory amorphous shapes take form in the flickering recesses, a result of retinal distress. Colors appear, change. Shapes advance and recede. Caverns of pulsing light, articulated by the ambient music (by Stars of the Lid), beckon with warmth­an antidote to the cold, hard-edged gallery-world we are standing in.

No longer does the light seem to come from the projectors on the floor but from a source deep within the walls. Prisms of light extend outward into the room, as if the world were cracking open at Savisky's portals. I want to enter. I want to walk around in a weightless world...a world with no up, no down, no cold hard ground...to feel the light on my skin, drift deep within the infinite luminosity. Will mortal flesh burn from a moment in Savisky's heaven?