Shadow Catching

Trained in architecture, sculpture, and dance Cynthia Pachikara explores the interplay between vision, movement, and spatial perception. In her “shadow installations” visitors unwittingly encounter cinematic imagery where none should be: inside the space of their own familiar, and engaged shadows. Conceived as spatial riddles, these installations visualize the notion of the body-as-screen and address the social contingency of the audience’s gaze. Spectatorship plays an important role in the construction of this work. The daughter of immigrants, Cynthia Pachikara uses phenomenological frameworks to imagine how separation from, remembrance of, and longing for distant landscapes can be experienced in art. She was trained in architecture and sculpture at the University of Illinois when the MOSAIC web browser was first introduced. Since then, she has examined the thresholds between physical and virtual environments created installations and sculptures that blur the boundaries between both.

Critics have described Pachikara’s works in terms of bodily experiences:

“To watch your own outline suddenly fill with pictures briefly creates the sensation of your own body actually dematerializing, of being neither here nor there…” – Randy Gragg, Oregonian (Portland, OR)

“Wherever the spectator moves, there is a disruption and then a ‘leaking’ out of another story, another image.” Robert Gero, Exhibition Essay, Gallery 210, (St. Louis, MO)

“Memory and identity here seem equally evanescent, caught in the oscillations of presence and absence.” Douglas Utter, Cleveland Free Times (Cleveland, OH) –

“Cynthia Pachikara has delivered an intense, compressed and possibly interminable experience.” Michael Weinstein, New City Newspaper (Chicago, IL) –

Currently Pachikara is exploring how scientific research on multimodal spatial perception can inspire artistic production strategies for natural, immersive art encounters with a minimum of technology: no goggles, no sensors, no computational interfaces except those with which the human body is already equipped. She is exploring ways that experimental psychology and neuroscience research can inform new media works in which the body of the spectator is the critical technology.

Concurrently, in a project entitled Light Cities, Pachikara has been developing tools and techniques to distill the light along urban passageways to understand how movement-through-illumination shapes geographic identity. The approach involves designing and mobilizing large-scale, camera + screen systems along common thoroughfares to collide with environmental light, mid-flight, as residents do. Thus, rather than framing up scenes bathed in light, her camera follows the light as it moves through a location: after has bounced off of, or is otherwise filtered by, by the built environment. The recorded reflections, refractions and shadows embody reliable inferences about their source sites, while also presenting an unambiguous separation from them. This footage is being collected for use in future shadow installation.

Pachikara has presented her work nationally and internationally in galleries, public spaces, and symposia. Her essays about installation art have been published in Metalsmith Magazine and in Forward, the Design Journal of the American Institute of Architects. She has received major grants for her studio research. She taught previously at Purdue University, Reed College, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Washington University in St. Louis. Pachikara is currently an Associate Professor in the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan and holds a courtesy appointment in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning where she taught for 10 years.