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It began with a journal of sorts: artist Carolina Loyola-Garcia’s archive of video images she records on her travels, often of the natural world.
“It’s a way for me to make sure I’m going to capture and hold and consolidate certain moments in my life, and I’ll be able to come back to them,” she said. “They don’t have a purpose other than me getting lost in the moment.”
But Loyola-Garcia did eventually find a use for some of that footage when the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership invited her to submit a proposal for a round-the-clock video installation for an empty storefront it curates.
The result is “Elemental,” a new multi-channel work in a long Smithfield Street storefront inside One Oxford Centre. Seven 3-foot-tall vertical screens play unique, silent video loops that run the gamut from sea anemones gently waving to ocean waves crashing in a rocky crevice and even an active Icelandic volcano.
The installation is set to run for a year.
“I am hoping that people that are here are gonna sort of take a moment and go like, ‘Oh the ocean,’ and they might come with me on this journey of getting lost in the up and down of the waves, or look at the beautiful intricate way in which lava moves,” said Loyola-Garcia.
Loyola-Garcia grew up in Santiago, Chile, and years ago envisioned a video installation focused on her “beloved” Pacific Ocean.
The project went unrealized, but was revived in a different form after local arts consultant Renee Piechocki recommended her to the PDP, which was looking for a successor to “People We Love,” the Piechocki-curated installation that occupied the storefront until late 2023.
“Elemental,” commissioned through PDP’s Uncommon & Curated Fund, is meant to activate the empty retail space and improve the street-level experience Downtown.
Bruce Chan, PDP’s senior director of urban design, said Loyola-Garcia’s proposal was appealing both because of its intense colors — the orange lava, the cool blue ocean — and because every screen is different.
“That dynamic difference of the screens was really something that I thought could work well as a pedestrian walking by,” Chan said.
The video screens are the same ones that displayed “People We Love,” but they’ve been moved closer to the windows, making them easier to view.
Loyola-Garcia said other footage in “Elemental” was shot in locales including Oregon, Moraine State Park’s Lake Arthur, and the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium. She said she planned to work in new footage every month or so during the installation’s run.
She called the project “a dream come true” for a video artist like her.
“This kind of work to me is very freeing, because I am not trying to convey any specific message. I’m not trying to make a point,” she said. “It’s about the aesthetics, and it’s about those moments that made me capture a specific something.”
“Elemental” is best viewed after dark; it’s hardest to see with the sun shining directly into the windows, which this time of year occurs in late afternoon.
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