This Installation Will Broadcast Your Confession Booth Experience To A Crowd At SCOPE

For over a decade, the SCOPE Art Fair is has been the premiere destination for contemporary art collectors and exhibitors the world over. Each year, the triannual show graces Basel Switzerland, Basel Miami, and New York, carrying with it hundreds of millions of dollars of artworks from leading contemporary artists across the globe.

During this year's New York show, SCOPE commissioned master designer and calligrapher, Aerosyn-Lex Mestrovic, in collaboration with experiential agency Fake Love, for ATRAMENTUM, the show's featured installation. The project is a massive monolithic chamber that treats those courageous enough to enter its mirrored walls to a personal experience styled like an infinitely-expanding confession booth. Participants' private experiences are then projected publicly to the entire fair on giant, holographic, Gothic arches. It's next-level confession, in a sense.

We spoke with artist and Creators Project featuree Aerosyn-Lex about his newest work, which opens at SCOPE this evening.

The Creators Project: What were your outside inspirations for this piece? 

Aerosyn-Lex Mestrovic: The initial concept extended from my recent Channel 4-commissioned short film, Scriptura Vitae, as the work was always intended to have a physical and interactive component to it. ATRAMENTUM is a continuation of the same visual language, and exploration into duality, symbolism, ink and geometry. This piece also continues the creative collaboration with the interactive and experiential agency, Fake Love. That collaborative process is a great part of the inspiration for this work. I come from a very traditionally artisanal, craft background. Having the ability to collide and create with such a technically talented and visionary team is truly inspiring to me.

How did your background in the calligraphic arts inform your process? 

Greatly. Calligraphy, and the visual illumination of language and communication is core to my work. Something I’ve always focused on is mark-making and the gesture. I think it’s something that’s commonly overlooked and under appreciated in our visual culture. I think people inherently gravitate toward images which are pop, shocking, loud and bombastic. The work that has always moved me the most is work in which you can see the artist’s hand and skill. Work in which a gesture is made with such assuredness and confidence that you can just see the 10,000 hours put into achieving that mark.

In a way I’d approached this large collaborative project in the same way. The technical expertise and creativity came from Fake Love… I brought the broad stroke concepts and visuals that combined to create a work that is inherently, and dualistically technical and organic at the same time. Our hope is that we create impression on the viewer. I hope they leave the work with a feeling, not just an image impressed into memory.

In your piece, private experiences are projected to a public audience. Can you speak to your work's relevance to our inherently-voyeuristic surveillance age?

The idea of the monolith for us was to create a very immersive and personal space. A place of reflection, pun intended. It’s almost like a confessional… you're there with yourself, your thoughts and an experience projected from your own actions. That event is completely private but we then save each participant's impressions and broadcast them to a sculptural installation at the front of the fair, opening them up to a wider audience. There is a level of abstraction in this process and as such—the general public can never really touch what each person experienced inside the monolith.

The SCOPE crowd looking at ATRAMENTUM

For more information on the installation (which opens tonight!), see SCOPE's website here. 

Images courtesy of SCOPE.