Pipilotti Rist (1962) is a swiss experimental video artist who creates multimedia installations with video and sculpture. She has a large scale exhibition called ‘Sip my Ocean’ at the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia), til Feb 18th, 2018. The works span from her videos of the 80s to her current more immersive environments. I was invited to the media preview exhibition. We were able to enjoy the artworks without having to compete with crowds – and more importantly able to take photos!

I decided to use a photography technique called double exposure. It stems from the film days of photography when a piece of film could be winded back and re used. This in effect layers the two separate exposures onto the same film. I like using it with coloured lights to create interesting portraits. I think it better represents the immersive nature of Pipilotti’s work. Having many layers in the image can be hard to balance out, so it takes a bit of experimentation to get right.

Many digital cameras recently can do double exposures. On my Fujifilm Xpro-2 the function is called ‘multiple exposure’. It lets you take an image, then shows a transparent preview of that image in the viewfinder to make it easier to layer the composition. It then combines it digitally into a jpeg. Because it’s a layered there is a loss of details in the shadows and highlights, so in editing I added a decent amount of exposure to bring out the composition. You can see below how I edited them.

Thank you to the MCA for having us, and to Alex, Maddie and De for helping and modelling. Check out the exhibition here.