ustxtxb_obs_2004_05_21_50_00027-00000_000.pdf

“It was literally as though the artwork itself gained life, but it was the viewer who gasped in astonishment.” material for his work. “The biggest problem, for everyone, is you hear the cash register ringing as the film is rolling through the camera,” he says. “Which can be frustrating, because I love the act of shooting; it takes such concentration. It’s a beautiful moment to me.” If a person who shoots film is a filmmaker, the main thing that separates Savisky’s projections from being “movies” \(besides the lack of overt narrative and he doesn’t show them on screens. “I’ve projected on moving trains, hillsides, sculpture, my own sculpture. I’ve made kind of living sculptures, projecting faces onto casts of faces. Bodies. Moving Bodies. I guess just about anything. Water. Smoke. Just about anything that you can project on. Buildings, of course. Architecture?’ In a recent piece, Savisky projected an original film loop of a girl, floating just under the surface of the water, onto a relief sculpture of a baby coming out of the birth canal. Just as the film girl’s face broke the surface of the water, it precisely aligned with the face of the baby, giving both pieces a depth and fullness that neither film nor sculpture alone could ever achieve. It was literally as though the artwork itself gained life, but it was the viewer who gasped in astonishment. Savisky says he’s trying to make “a connection on a really basic human level:’ Politics comes from that, he adds, “whether or not you can allow yourself to connect with other people and to make this association with their basic humanity. I’d like to get to that point where the connection is made initially, and you see the similarities to the way people respond to things, and in that way you’re more likely to treat other people with respect?’ And so he’s constantly looking for new ways to make those connections. When I asked about future projects he responded with a long list of ideas, including some 35mm and 70mm projects, further outdoor experiments, projecting film in conversation with the landscape, and a top-secret idea he didn’t want me to print because he wanted it to be a surprise. When I suggested he was full of possibilities, Savisky responded, “Maybe a little too full. I get overwhelmed with possibilities:’ But like the art of filmmaking itself, Luke Savisky is growing. Like the giant peering out of the museum on Congress, his ideas are already too big for any one art form to contain them. Kirk Lynn is the playwright-in-residence for the Austin-based theater collective, Rude Mechanicals. write dialogue The Texas Observer 307 W. 7th St. Austin, TX 78701 [email protected] 5/21/04 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 27