A Miami Hotel Becomes a Dynamic, Monumental Canvas

Artists team up to projection map the 350' tall InterContinental Miami.

December 5, 2015, 8:10pm

Joanie Lemercier, courtesy Form and Substance

The monumental facade of the InterContinental Miami hotel has been turned into a huge canvas by the Brussels-based French new media artist Joanie Lemercier, well-known for his next level projection mapping skills, alongside a handful of talented visual artists such as László Zsolt Bordos with whom Lemercier shares a taste for minimal aesthetics and patterned structures.

"In parallel to my installation works, I've been working on new, smaller formats and artworks, presented in galleries and fairs, and I learn a lot from confronting my work to the art world," Lemercier tells The Creators Project. "So when Michelle and Bryan Dodson invited me to be part of their Form and Substance program, a series of experimental film screenings on the facade of the InterContinental hotel in Miami, I was thrilled by the opportunity of presenting my work on such scale. The building is 350 feet high and can be seen from several miles away."

Photo: Joanie Lemercier

Presented during Art Basel Miami Beach week, the scale of the work in this second edition of the projection, lighting, and mapping-focused exhibition, Form and Substance, was tricky in terms of parameters regarding the quality of projection resolution. "The scale of the projection is rather extreme, so the AV partner DWP Live had to use nine projectors stacked in threes, controlled via D3 servers to provide enough pixels and brightness to the artists," he explains of the technical part of the project, while Artefact, an exploration of the corruption of 3D structures, and Motif, a new series of silent pieces exploring linear patterns and geometric tilings, embrace the hotel's north facade. The works overlook Biscayne Bay Tower from nightfall during the art week's festivities.

Photo: Joanie Lemercier

Highlighting cutting-edge practices in terms of mapping and light art, the multi-format show takes advantage of the unique architecture provided by the space, providing viewers with not only large-scale projections, but also a breathtaking series of single-channel videos displayed on monitors, a mapped projection on Henry Moore's lobby-located Spindle sculpture, and a bunch of scattered light installations that further enhance the space.

Plus, if you want to enjoy more, Lemercier's artworks by daytime, a few of his recent works—alongside works by Treasure Frey, Yongjae Kim, Lab[au], Numen / For Use, and Keun Young Park—are being showcased with the NYC-based Muriel Guepin gallery booth situated in H-8 at the Miami Project Fair.

If you're around, the projection runs until Sunday. If you can't make it, check out images of the massive mapping project below: