Craig Walsh spotlights everyday people and their impactful contributions to society in Monuments, a large-scale, nighttime video installation. The Australian visual artist projects people’s portraits onto trees in public spaces to honor community heroes and create welcoming spaces.

“When I made this work the art—the trees—are looking at the audience, so there’s this reversal of the role of art,” said Walsh, who’s from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

“That work does take on different meanings to different people and quite often in different cultures and different places. That’s the beauty of touring this work—it’s always different in every location.”

Walsh is bringing his Monuments video installation to Ann Arbor’s Wheeler Park September 4-8 in partnership with Ann Arbor Summer Festival and the Ann Arbor District Library.

It's also receiving support from the University of Michigan Arts Initiative, Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library, and the Ladies Library Association. 

Monuments arrives during the city’s bicentennial year and celebrates the living history of four individuals who have served the community:

- Bonnie Billups Jr., executive director of Peace Neighborhood Center. He oversees the center and its services and programs for local children, families, and individuals affected by social and economic challenges.

- Joyce Hunter, president/CEO of the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County. She spearheads the museum's research, collection, preservation, and exhibition of cultural and historical materials about the life and work of local African Americans.

- Keith Orr and Martin Contreras. The married partners and community leaders/activists owned Ann Arbor’s \aut\BAR from 1995 to 2020 and created a natural gathering place for the local LGBTQ+ community.

“The four individuals that we’ve chosen are really remarkable and wonderful in their own right," said JD Carter, Ann Arbor Summer Festival’s associate director. "We’re seeing that they have a combined history of the city and the community of 160 years, which is nearly 200 [years].

“When you’re talking about a bicentennial, the breadth of their careers and their work in the community almost encompasses the amount of time that we’re talking about celebrating in Ann Arbor.”

For Monuments in Ann Arbor, Walsh will project videos of portraits of Billups, Hunter, Orr, and Contreras on trees over five nights in Wheeler Park.

Monuments not only highlights the honorees and their contributions, but it also challenges expectations of public monuments and the selective history that’s represented in public spaces.

“For the public, it’s very interesting to find out this other information that isn’t or can’t be portrayed in the format or the structure of a monument,” said Walsh, whose nighttime video projections transform trees into sculptural moments.

“As a temporal work, you have a lot more freedom to explore those stories without the issues surrounding longevity because that’s a big problem with most of our public spaces and with public art.”

To learn more, I spoke to Walsh about Monuments ahead of this week’s nighttime events at Wheeler Park and a September 4 artist talk at AADL’s Downtown location.

Q: Tell me how your artistic journey started and has evolved.
A: I was always interested in drawing and art as a child. I ended up doing a degree in fine art and majoring in sculpture and minoring in new technologies [at Griffith University]. In Brisbane, at that time, it was a place of transition, so there were lots of empty spaces, lots of spaces for big studios, and lots of demolished sites. I was doing land art and doing a lot of art reconfiguring the natural environments that existed. I was finding ways to get people to look at places in new ways and using art to do that.

That was the grounding for an exploration of site-specific art and making work for a public space. I started to see all the benefits of doing that outside of a gallery context. I’m fortunate there are lots of spaces for us to explore and experiment with. It’s one of those serendipitous situations where I saw the opportunity and it was a benefit of where I was living so that I could explore that.

Q: How did studying fine art help lay the foundation for your artistic vision?
A: I think art schools and universities within their categories of sculpture, painting, and ceramics were fairly rigid in my experience. I felt like it was an obligation for me to try and disrupt those expectations and that was part of my motivation. Because I was doing sculpture—I really liked sculpture—and I would say I’m still a sculptor [even though] I use projection.

Doing [new technologies] as a minor in those days, it was very early Photoshop with photography and it was very rudimentary technology, but it did lead me to think, “What if I use photography over three-dimensional objects?” I started to cross over between my minor and my major, and I had slide projectors of evidence photography and started to project those onto sculptures I was making.

I was projecting them on paintings I was making and I was creating textured surfaces and using slide projection onto them to experiment. It was bringing those two elements together and no longer seeing them as separate. And, from that, I saw the potential for new sculptures, and that led to the use of projection in natural environments.

Q: What creatives inspired your artistic vision for project mapping in public spaces?
A: Everyone from [Berenice] Abbott to anyone doing the social documentary work was important to me. I was really interested in the everyday and we can even go back to Donald Judd. For me, I thought, “Why is art trying to re-create the everyday when we can just take people to the everyday?” That was the foundation for a lot of my early public works and the temporal interventions that I was creating throughout the city in different scales—from sound works to visual works to painting to some projection. I was just exploring everything.

Q: How did attending Australia’s Woodford Folk Festival in the early ‘90s initially inspire the idea for Monuments?
A: That particular event—I was in my third year of study at the university—I had been exploring these black-and-white portraits onto different surfaces. There were six artists who were invited to stay on the site for three weeks, so we camped without any clear objective of what we were going to do, but we were going to make work for that festival.

One of the things I did was I took the slide projector with these black-and-white slides and I had a generator. We drove around this woodland site in the back of this ute with a projector and these slides of portraits. For a lot of the time, I wasn’t seeing a pathway for its use because it just looked like an image moving across the landscape. They seemed separate; there wasn’t any synergy or connection that I could find. We slowed down and it happened that the portrait projected onto a tree was exactly the same size as the projected portrait. At that one moment, it became a three-dimensional sculpture and that was a revelation.

Q: What did you learn from that revelation? How did it help set the tone of Monuments?
A: From that point on, I’ve developed many different ways of creating the intervention of art into both urban spaces and natural spaces. But for that one, the synergy is powerful and the content itself—the human form over the tree and the apparent connection—has always been powerful in the audience’s experience of it. It’s always interpreted in so many different ways and now it’s been going for a few eras, so it changes over time and that’s what art should do.

Q: How did the concept of Monuments grow after that?
A: It was a natural evolution because I had been doing different projects in communities. I did a project where I toured Australia for two years in a big van with projectors and generators. We would turn up in small communities, and I would work there for a month and make work in the community about that community. I had done site-specific work with First Nations communities in Australia in the Far North. I had built up this experience working with communities and that’s a difficult thing to do. It’s difficult for an artist to go into a place and be able to create work that still has ownership for the people involved.

Monuments came about because I have been able to build this experience, and I’ve experimented so much that I could consolidate all of those experiences and ideas into a solid concept and application that could be toured. There’s a practicality to being able to move this work around. It’s unique to be able to create a site-specific work that is tourable. About eight or nine years ago, I reframed and restructured it as Monuments. Most of my work would question the sculpture in public art, whether it be the monument or whether it was any permanent public art. I’ve always been interrogating those ideas around public art. This became obvious as a concept and the idea of “Let’s start questioning what these monuments are in civic spaces. Can this work act as a catalyst to have a greater conversation about the stories that we tell about our community and about the place?” It was a range of different things I was exploring—concepts and formal applications—that came together. I spent time building it as the Monuments project.

Q: How does Monuments provide communities with an alternative for representing history in public spaces?
A: I still think [traditional] monuments still have a place, but I don’t think they should be the only option when considering how we tell our stories in public spaces. In a way, there’s a great responsibility with a monument. It has to cover such a large period of time, it’s supposed to last forever, and its relevance is supposed to last forever. It’s too much responsibility and I don’t think we put that responsibility on any other civic structure that we have.

I’m offering an alternative not to replace [traditional monuments]; I think that’s a bigger question and still needs to be worked out how we continue to make those objects relative and relevant over time. I’ve made works around monuments that exist using my temporal projections, and I’ve been able to tell a story around that monument that hasn’t been told or can’t be told through the statue itself. It became the catalyst to tell some other stories.

Q: Monuments celebrates the living history of everyday individuals who create welcoming spaces and changes in their communities. How does this artistic concept continue to support that?
A: Part of the process for Monuments and something that I’ve done purposely is to put a lot of work back on the host or the client who’s commissioning the work. It’s not me who can come into a place and make these decisions about how we might curatorially define who is going to be represented in these portraits.

But I instill that idea with whoever I’m working with—and that’s a really good question to be throwing around in the community when making that decision. The project is so successful because it’s not just about the outcome, but it’s actually about the process that engages a wider, broader community. It asks different questions about who we honor and select in our community and how we honor people whose everyday, small contributions are as important as the bigger ones. That’s purposely built into the project and its legacy stuff.

Q: What is your creative process for developing the videos of people’s faces that are featured in a Monuments exhibit?
A: A lot of people think it’s complicated, but it’s not. We just learned over time the filming of the subject—the shadow and light—and the small things or little details make it work. Over the years, I’ve explored so many different applications for this [project]. What I’ve learned over time is to keep it minimal; the actions are minimal. We do use sound at times, but I’ve never used spoken word. The post-production we think is simple now, but we’ve just developed it over a long period of time.

We’re now at a point where we’re starting to explore 3D portraits, and we can map new features onto those 3D models. We’re also exploring the interactivity with the tree itself, but not just in a formal [way] of people moving in the space. We’re interested in data we can collect from that region and how data might influence the actions of the tree. We’re at a stage now where we’re building toward the next version of the work. The people I work with now work with the sophisticated end of animation. I’m starting to feel much happier with the results we’re getting and that opens up lots of other opportunities.

Q: What excites you the most about bringing Monuments to a community like Ann Arbor?
A: It adds to the archive, and I think the stories that come out of each place are specific to those places. This adds to the story, and for me, it’s fascinating because I’m always learning. They’re interesting people doing interesting things, so it’s a great gateway into a place to meet those people. There’s great satisfaction in sharing this artwork—it has such an effect on people.

Q: What do you hope people take away from Monuments when it opens on September 4?
A:  I’ve always thought art shouldn’t be prescriptive, and it needs to be open so people can interpret it. Fundamentally, if we go beyond the concept of Monuments, compositing the human form over the natural world sets up a scenario that should be common for contemplation. One of the great benefits of this project is that I get people to look at trees, too. They might pass them every day, and they’ve never really looked at them. It harks back to those early works I was doing around the everyday and how do you draw attention to the everyday? One [takeaway] would be to consider our relationship to the natural world and coexistence and some synergy that’s going on there. I hope it offers an example of contemporary public art that can extend the way we think and extend the breadth of what’s possible in our public art practices and what we do in civic spaces as far as art.

For the individuals involved, it’s a big experience because they’re mostly quiet people who are not used to being in the spotlight, and to suddenly see themselves that big in the public areas, there’s a great satisfaction for them. I think they feel like they are being honored for what they’ve done and their families are very aware of what they’ve been doing. It’s a great benefit for them, too.

Q: What’s next on the horizon for you and Monuments?
A: I’m going to Bethesda, [Maryland] for a project there and then I’m going to Santa Cruz, [California] to do another Monuments project there. Every year, we create a tour where I can do three or four [projects]. We have to come when there are leaves on the trees, so we have a small window that we can do it over here. I’ve been doing that for the last couple of years, and hopefully, it will continue because it’s a really great way for the work to travel.

Lori Stratton is a library technician, writer for Pulp, and writer and editor of strattonsetlist.com.

“Monuments” runs September 4-8 at 8:30 pm at Wheeler Park, 200 Depot Street in Ann Arbor. The artist talk with Craig Walsh runs from 6:30-7:30 pm at AADL’s Downtown location, 343 South Fifth Avenue in Ann Arbor. Both events are free and open to the public.