Windows: a site-specific installation by Chris Fraser

March 2 - April 21, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 2, 1-4pm

Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 1–4 pm

Special Event Bob Miller’s Light Walk: Saturday, March 16, 3:30-5pm // With Bob Miller’s Light Walk as a performance score, Chris Fraser will guide participants through a type of perceptual training. Using our bodies and a handful of humble tools, we will learn how to find images in the light outside the gallery.

About the exhibition

Royal NoneSuch Gallery presents Windows: a site-specific installation by Bay Area artist Chris Fraser. Fraser constructs environments modeled on historical image-making technologies, from the camera obscura to the magic lantern. In turn, he uses these antiquated apparatuses to project ephemeral images of the surroundings.

For Windows, Fraser has built a traditional stud and lath wall that diagonally bisects the gallery space. On one side of the wall the tightly hung laths create narrow apertures. On the other side, sheets of paper are attached to the studs to catch the light that passes through these small openings. This ad hoc wall functions like a bank of stained glass windows, their colors determined by the weather and time of day.

Fraser arrived at his practice of making site-specific room-sized camera works in order to shift the viewer’s experience of photographic image from the quotidian and fixed to experiential and in flux. Windows uses the gallery as a camera obscura, one that accommodates both observation and locomotion. At the scale of architecture, this installation allows us to invest ourselves differently—to see ourselves as belonging to space rather than possessing it.

Artist Bio

Chris Fraser constructs environments modeled on historical image-making technologies, from the camera obscura to the magic lantern. These apparatuses put objects in dialogue with their images, sacrificing broad distribution for an experience of image that is local and ephemeral. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Disjecta in Portland, OR, Gallery Wendi Norris and SF Camerawork in San Francisco, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona. Fraser participated in Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and received a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. He teaches at Mills College in Oakland, CA.