(Originally titled) The Sound of Time, Gallerie Optica, Montreal, Canada,
April, 2003

Liberty (leading the people), Noga Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel, December, 2003

Photograph 52" x 67", video projection 52" x 67", video projector, 12 minute DVD, floor mirror 52" x 67", concave mirror 11" x 11" x 2", blue theatrical lighting gel (unique to Optica installation)

Liberty (Leading the People), a reflection on Eugene Delacroix's romantic/classical painting Liberty Leading the People, 1830, is a poetic evocation of longing, loss and mourning — all inner emotions associated with unrequited desire for freedom, a "freedom" seemingly within reach and inevitably beyond our reach. It is a desire that propels human beings no matter what our cultural heritage, no matter what our gender, class and race lines.

Cypis employs elements of photography, video, performance, installation and sculpture to charge the gallery space into a phenomenological "place" where one's interior experience mixes with one's direct experience of the social space, where relationships can be recognized as simultaneously personal and social, psychological and political. Immersed in a gallery environment containing a window, two mirrors, a photograph and a video projection, viewers are enticed to witness their complicity in constructing emotional and social narratives.

Like a witness lens, a concave wall mirror, 11" x 11" x 2", greets and reflects the viewer as reversed and upside down. On the floor, a flat mirror further destabilizes the gravity of the gallery space.

Two images, one still, the other in movement, and the mirror on the floor, all share the same proportions, 52" x 67". The still image, a photograph transformed from its original cut out from the Los Angeles Times in June 2000, is of a group of Palestinian men (now turned upside down), caught running in a cloud of tear gas while a child crawls along a narrow path (now) above them. The image's transformation has shifted its original political intention into one evoking a personal memory of mythological proportions. The floor mirror lying before this photograph reverses the transformed image back to its original political evocation, reminding us that the political and the psychological cannot be stripped from one another.

The image in movement is a video projection of curtains caught in a fierce gale as they negotiate their containment by a window frame. These curtains, relentless in their physicality, body-full in their movement and motivation to be free, hang in a hotel room in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Blue theatrical lighting gel has been installed to cover the panes of glass in the existing gallery window, filtering a blue light into the gallery that mimics the ocean blue emanating from the projected video image, evoking a sense of spatial displacement.

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