In Jiayu Liu’s Tracing the Sky, a hidden underground space in a busy city is transformed into an immersive sanctuary. Under a Victorian shopping arcade, a space void of physical content is filled with floating motion graphics emerging from the brick walls of the deep basement hideaway.

Exhibition: 14 – 20 July 2019
Press preview: 14 July
Open to public: 15-17 July & 19-20 July
Closed: 18 July

Brickworks, Barton Arcade, 48 Barton Square, Manchester M3 2BH

Arresting imagery glides across the brickwork, vaulted ceilings and chambers of the subterranean location, filling the architecture with dreamlike skyscapes. The work uses 3D scanning, projection mapping and mobile phones equipped with augmented reality software to allow the audience to interact with the projections. Visitors will find themselves immersed in a fluid environment of simulated clouds and skies that change in response to how they interact with the installation via smartphone technology. Sounds generated from these interactions will add another dimension to the experience.

Tracing the Sky brings together in the same space two contrasting elements: the sky (air) and architecture (earth). This encounter allows each element to accentuate the presence of the other, overlapping virtuality and reality, tangible and intangible, human-made and natural. Jiayu Liu combines art and technology, creating a poetic way for visitors to observe and interact with their surrounding environment. Liu invites them to consider the empty space not just in terms of what it has to show, but as a place to reflect on our relationship with the natural, in this case the atmosphere and encompassing skies.