Last year Patrick McCarthy and a couple of pals were playing around with electric motors, attaching pens and markers to them to see what they’d create on paper. Says McCarthy, “One of us said, ‘How about having a gallery show with these machines? We’ll let them draw and paint and stuff and then we’ll auction off the work.’ We all went ha, ha, ha. And then we went and did it.”
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“I invented 3-D shadow puppetry,” McCarthy claims. Traditional shadow puppetry is an ancient, primarily Indonesian art form in which minuscule puppets are manipulated behind small screens for intimate audiences. McCarthy–who occupies himself as a painter, animator, computer programmer, theater producer, and gallery manager–founded Rubber Monkey Puppet Company in 1993 and the next year came up with a projection system that makes the shadows seem to leap into the audience. “I like to have ten-foot-tall shadows,” McCarthy says. “We’re probably the biggest change in shadow puppetry in a couple of thousand years.”
For eight years McCarthy put on shows at galleries, coffee shops, and bars around town. Once he had the loft, however, he built a stage that stretched from wall to wall and installed rows of folding chairs. He hung up huge fabric panels to form a white screen in front of an orchestra pit and provided each audience member with a pair of 3-D glasses. The shows consistently sold out, but he knew it couldn’t last–the lease was to run out in September. So he and his friends started planning the “Deus ex Machina” closing party.
“The whole show was like a robot circus,” McCarthy says. “People couldn’t stop themselves from going through our boxes of parts and toys and starting to make things. One guy found an old fan and said, ‘Can I just lay this down on paper and pour paint in it while it’s running?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ He said, ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’ But you get a roomful of machines going at it and suddenly it’s OK for you to make art.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Audrey Cho.
