At the Armory: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Creates in Paint Swatches and Video Games

The Armory Show consists of over 300 galleries and thousands of artists, parading new talent out alongside pieces by Kandinksy and Warhol, Damien Hirst and Murakami. Though the majority of works appear in traditional mediums, interactive, video-based work always draws a crowd weary from looking at booths and booths of acrylics, apoxy, krylon and more.

Canadian-Mexican Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is having a solid 2010. Already internationally known for his crowdsourcing Olympic light show, a show at the Guggenheim and residencies all over the US, it was only appropriate that the famous new media artist appear at New York's Armory Show, featured at the Swiss-based Galerie Guy Bärtschi (who also had works by Marina Abramovic and metal-worker Wim Delvoye).

Yet it was Lozano-Hemmer's wall-mounted video that onlookers gravitated towards, standing for sometimes entire minutes trying to grasp the concept. The ninth in "Shadow Box Series," named for the video screen the art is displayed on, "The Company of Colours," uses paint swatches that prospective decorators receive at hardware stores as pixels. The image projected morphs the viewer into a hyper-tonal, blocky and computerized version of herself. Using a sensor, viewers were converted into only the hues the surveillance system sensed, all with Benjamin Moore-inspired names like "Rose Taupe" or "Burnt Sienna." Then, the image changes to a grid depicting "culturally-significant" color palettes from classic video systems, like the pea-green Nintendo Gameboy or the 16-Bit Commodore 64.

As participants flex and pose in front of the system, the colors continue to change, showing the ways in which color rendering has influenced our vision. Whether we are merely pixels on a screen, easily categorized paint swatches or complex machines able to assimilate different tones without digital help, Lozano-Hemmer's piece once again fuses the technological with the human.

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