Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016

In Projection Painting II Josiah McElheny projects footage from filmmaker Maya Deren’s 1951 abandoned Ensemble for Somnambulists, which he reworked to further abstract its ghostly imagery, onto a painted form covered with a sheet of glass, superimposing the dark sky of the film onto both its painted planar surface and the glass above it. McElheny’s composite space indicates the possibility of a fourth dimension, its physical contours evoking the system of colored cubes known as “Tesseracts” that was invented in the nineteenth-century by the British mathematician and science-fiction writer Charles Howard Hinton to visualize what a four-dimensional space might look like.