Paul Pfeiffer, "Cross Hall (2008)," Wall-recessed mixed media diorama, peephole, live video feed projection. Dimensions variable. Installation view courtesy of Carlier Gebauer. Photo by Bernd Borchardt. Collection of Sammlung Goetz, Munich.via Switchboard

Looks like a great line up for a panel with a ho-hum title “Confounding Expectations X: Photography in Context The Projected Photograph” at the Vera List Center this Thursday – George Baker, Andrea Geyer, Paul Pfeiffer, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

“This panel will explore the multiple ways in which contemporary artists have utilized projection and installation strategies to display still photographic images, creating immersive and cinema-like experiences in museum and gallery environments.”

It’s still faintly amusing to me that a stellar panel like this might coalesce around the medium-specificity of the photographic image, deploying the term “immersive” in relation to cinema without, apparently, a nod to either the communicating projections of, say, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitiz’s Hole-in-Space or the dynamic environments of, say, Fashionably Late for the Relationship (installation version) by R. Luke Dubois and Lián Amaris.

The Projection Project. Installation view. Curated by Edwin Carels, Mark Kre

Nevertheless, it is a rich topic. See MHKA’s The Projection Project exhibition with work by Marie José Burki, Marc De Blieck, Thierry De Cordier, Rodney Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Kristina Ianatchkova & Vitto Valentinov, Timothée Ingen-Housz, Yeondoo Jung, André Kruysen,Bertrand Lavier, Bruce Nauman, Stephen & Timothy Quay, Joost Rekveld, Matthew Stokes, Fiona Tan, Krassimir Terziev, Ana Torfs, Paul Van Hoeydonck, Benjamin Verdonck, Cerith Wyn Evans and Thomas Zummer.

I contributed a talk “Into the Streets,” which attempted to construct a discernible trajectory from the kind of gallery-based work that Chrissie Illes presented in her mesmerizing 2001 exhibition, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, to contemporary practice, such as Wodiczko’s CECUCT project and the kind of work I am interested in at Northern Lights as well as the 01SJ Biennial.

And hopefully, Pfeiffer will at least mention his The Saints project, which remains an animating experience for me and taught me that even in a large-scale, public context, spectacular size is not everything. The visual element of The Saints was physically minor, even though critical to the overall experience.