BRIAN Connolly's shadowy, sophisticated Over View installation at the Project makes startling use of the centre's foyer, working with light and gravity, quietly seizing control in three dimensions as it invades the space with its nest of delicately counterbalanced surveillance.
The installation involves a relief map of Belfast, with the peaks and troughs of the city's topography "drawn" by an array of buckets, suspended at various heights by fine lines of nylon rope. Each of these free swinging buckets holds a burning candle and has a 360 photographic view of a different part of the city pasted on its interior.
Certain of these twinkling buckets are spied on by a close circuit television camera, the images from which are relayed to a ring of monitors set on a cloth covered table. When viewed through the monitors, the photographs appear to show the sort of views that military observation posts might have, scanning across the city.
Connolly, however, goes further than much of the recent Irish art which uses security cameras as its central motif. He is not content simply to highlight the way in which surveillance helps to draw one alternative map of the city. Instead, he pushes the idea a significant degree further, turning electronic observation into a metaphor for a different vision of the same situation.