Contained Elsewhere | Chris Flower
Contained Elsewhere, Chris Flower (Montreal, QC).
April 2017. Wood, found items, video filmed using GoPro or iPhone6 cameras.
For Flower, a box can be many things. It can be at once a theater, petri dish, storage container, mirror, and a cabinet of curiosity. It can be a way to control gravity and a way to store ideas.
Contained Elsewhere is a series of video works that take place within boxes of Flower’s design. Filming with only an iPhone6 or GoPro camera, he manipulated collection objects from the Natural History Museum within handmade, painted wooden boxes. Using a special apparatus to fix camera angle and light direction, Flower maintains an illusion of external stillness while toys, firecrackers, knick-knacks, and other ephemera move within his boxes, seemingly of their own volition.
Flower's colorful, gravity-defying montages engage a sense of play, experimentation, nostalgia, and innocence. Manipulations of scale, depth, and time invite both curiosity and disorientation. Up becomes down and down up as viewers, too, find themselves within Flower’s boxes, brought along on an absurd and otherworldly journey.
Process
