Eric Corriel Studios

multidisciplinary art studio • immersive and interactive public art • art activism • digital/electronic art • nyc

Yellow Forest

Site-specific video installation

Photo courtesy of Eric Corriel Studios

Yellow Forest fuses a patch of urban/industrial landscape with a patch of Andalusian landscape

The urban/industrial landscape of Gowanus, Brooklyn can be characterized by warehouses, red brick, grime, large transport trucks, buses, and shops ranging from tire to marble. The picturesque landscape of Andalusia in southern Spain is marked by olive and orange trees, artisanal ornamentation, heavy use of yellow, red, brown and white architectural elements, narrow winding streets, and an incredibly warm light producing a multicolored pallet everywhere one looks. The installation of the latter in the former aims to create a playful and visually compelling landscape all its own.

Nearly two years in the making, this piece has gone through several phases of evolution before manifesting itself as a site-specific installation. It started as landscape drawings of the Andalusian landscape done in marker on paper.

Landscape drawing of Southern Spain
These drawings would later be scanned and remade digitally

These drawings were scanned and reworked to create a digital, vector-based illustration.

Digital drawing of the Spanish landscape

This illustration was then printed out as color separations and, via the silkscreening processes, transformed into a print on vellum for the Al Andaluz exhibit at the Musée des Beaux Arts, Dunkerque, France.

The landscape drawing made into screen prints on vellum
The color and quality of the paper mimicked the golden light of the acutal landscape
An important quality of the material is its opacity

Although it never materialized, this was my first attempt at transposing one landscape into another; a theme that would later come back into my work in a major way.

Digital rendering of a possible mural project

A desire to explore the possibilities of animation led to the creation of Yellow Forest, a digital animation created with fluid dynamic particle systems in 3D software.

The piece evolved yet again, into a large format video installation, which was presented as part of my thesis show in 2007.

Yellow Forrest, original installation as presented for thesis show, 2007

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of its evolution is the fact that this piece has gone from being about the landscape to being part of the landscape.

Yellow Forest, site-specific video installation, 2009

Yellow Forest—the site-specific video installation— was conceived for the BAG Gallery show SURFACE - Contemporary Artists Interpret Landscape, which ran from March 20th, 2009 to April 2nd, 2009. This piece runs for 1’06 on loop and measures 24’ x 6’.