Liberty (leading the people), 2003
Noga Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel,
(Original title) The Sound of Time, Gallerie Optica, Montreal, Canada
C print photograph 52″x67″, video projection 52″x67″, video projector,
12 minute/repeat DVD, floor mirror 52”x67”, concave mirror 11” x 11” x 2”,
theatrical lighting gel (for window and light fixtures)
Liberty (leading the people) is a reflection on Eugene Delacroix’s romantic/classical painting Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Cypis employs photography, video, performance, and sculpture to create an immersive space of experience and discovery, psychological, physical and political.
On entering the gallery a concave mirror on the wall greets and reflects the space and viewer as reversed and upside down. A floor mirror continues reversed reflection, also reversing a video projection, of curtains caught in a fierce gale as they negotiate their window containment, (Tel Aviv, Israel). Blue theatrical lighting gel installed over the existing gallery window, filters a blue light that mimics the ocean blue emanating from the projected video image, evoking a sense of spatial displacement.
A photograph of a child crawling along a narrow path above an upside down group of Palestinian men running in a cloud of tear gas, has been transformed from a political to a psycho mythological connotation (Los Angeles Times, June 2000). The floor mirror below reverses the image back to its original political evocation, suggesting that the political and the psychological cannot be stripped from one another.
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