Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Soft Rains Installation view. "Soft Rains" is a set of seven table-top platforms which hold miniatures, lights, micro video cameras and electronics.The cameras frame images of the models which, when edited together via a live, computer controlled editing system, make short, fragmentary films.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Soft Rains"(cabin), 2003, detail
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Soft Rains," 2003, platform view
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Soft Rains"(suburban home) 2003, detail
Extending from their work of databased television and film material, the McCoy’s second New York solo exhibition Soft Rains further explored cinematic deconstruction.
Soft Rains consists of seven platforms each holding a miniature film set outfitted with model-scale suburban houses, warehouse buildings, city streets, parks, and people. Each of the seven sets includes images and sounds from a particular cinematic genre including such genres as the eighties slasher, the fifties melodrama and the sixties art film.
Each set is equipped with miniature cameras and lights atop flexible arms that poke in from every angle and focus on different areas. The scenes are shot simultaneously and are sent to a computer running custom software that edits them together into seven different movies which are projected onto a large screen. Each story is told in eight to ten shots. All the camera feeds are live; the computer makes up the selection. When the computer edits the images and compiles them together the result gives the impression of change, of time passing, when in reality the sets are static.
“It is actually the computer that creates filmic narrative out of a fake reality.”[3] The presentation and construction of Soft Rains emphasizes the artifice of film making. For example, “The disparate scales of figures and buildings within the same platform are equalized by the camera, just as staging tricks are used to make real-life actors appear taller (or shorter) than in real life.”[4]
[3] Chus Martinez, “Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: A Passion for Detail,” 16, http://www.postmastersart.com.
[4] Stephanie Cash, “The Producers,” Art in America, March 2005, 126
