Creating an identity for an artist is about building an invisible infrastructure for the artist to fully inhabit. The design of the identity should weave together the artist’s body of work in a way that is sympathetic, curious, and at times, nuanced. Mira Cantor’s gallery exhibition, Inundated, showcased a series of paintings she created during her residency in the west coast of Ireland. The exhibition questioned how we determine boundaries as she describes the coast as “where the sea and land are in a perpetual dance and where the line between them is always in flux.” The exhibit addresses topographical boundaries that are changing due to global warming, layered with depictions of unsteady polarized geopolitical borders created by events such as Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election.
We created a microsite as an online component to accompany the exhibit. Since the project was about borders, we played with ideas of physical space and the limitations of the edges of a digital screen. We used elements and close-ups from her paintings to create a “border” around the screen. From there, users can select each element and slide them towards the center of the screen to establish new borders. Layered underneath the painting elements is a video screen that is only visible once the user slides away a central image, revealing a carousel of videos depicting either nature-based or political events that are unraveling from their usual sense of order. This accompaniment to the paintings allows visitors to interact with Cantor’s work in a different context and be an active participant in the artwork.
