Mary Alton

Mary Alton has been a practicing holographer for over 10 years and her pieces can be found in collections in Canada, the US, and Europe. She is also a founding member of the Photon League.

Mary Alton's "Sappho Project" is a suite of six holograms each 1 meter sq.. They are hung in a circle 4 meters in diameter. Behind the holograms text is projected on the walls. The atmosphere is supplemented by the contemporary music of composer/performer Robert W. Stevenson.

Alton says, "(The Sappho Project) is about language and the development of language relevant to the different media we work with--specifically sound and the play of light. The text is based on the fragments of Sappho's poetry that have survived by recreation over 24 centuries. We are interested in the quality of time that the text and the media share."

Rondo , the performance aspect of The Sappho Project, premiered February 12, at the Music Gallery in Toronto, presented by 5th Species.

"Mary Alton's other contribution, "Critical mass" is an installation using video, sound and computer generated images to evoke a virtual crowd.

The self awareness of the individual in the crowd and the loss of his or her individuality within the crowd is the seed of this project. In defining her inspiration the artist quotes from "The Crowd in American Literature" by Nicolaus Mills: "American Democracy as a collective process is epitomized by men in flux, not merely a body of institutions or a state of mind symbolized by an Adamic figure alone in Nature....The central question regarding crowd, can the powerless, by acts of protest that draw media attention, achieve political ends that neither their numbers nor their influence would otherwise bring about?"

She goes on to say "Critical mass is a physics term used to describe the amount of fissionable material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. Critical mass has also been used recently in a more popular sense to describe the point at which the crowd mentality takes over. Is a crowd just a group of people until that point is reached? The aim of this project is to explore the phenomenon of critical mass.

The individual becoming
Becoming a pack
Becoming a crowd
Becoming a nomad traversing the space between individual, (lone wolf), pack, crowd.

What is the affect of the nomad network on the individual in the crowd, in the pack; surrounded by media?"

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