
NCMA Cloud Chamber
Clip: Season 23 Episode 4 | 5m 23sVideo has Closed Captions
Step into the Cloud Chamber, outside the North Carolina Museum of Art, for a new view of the world.
The Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky is nestled in the woods outside the North Carolina Museum of Art. Join producer Sadie Maddock as she steps into the exhibit to witness a whole new view of the surrounding world.
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North Carolina Weekend is a local public television program presented by PBS NC

NCMA Cloud Chamber
Clip: Season 23 Episode 4 | 5m 23sVideo has Closed Captions
The Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky is nestled in the woods outside the North Carolina Museum of Art. Join producer Sadie Maddock as she steps into the exhibit to witness a whole new view of the surrounding world.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- Art and beauty mingle at the park by the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.
Producer Sadie Maddock takes time to stroll through the woods and discover the magic of a small building that hides a whole new view of the world.
- There are no two moments in this space that are the same.
The trees are constantly growing or losing leaves or dropping branches.
The sun is constantly moving.
It's different from season to season, but also second to second.
- There's always wonder in nature.
I can get lost in seeing a plant that I love flowering.
And there's always something new that just, you know, is astounding sometimes.
- When you hang two paintings next to each other, they have a conversation that they wouldn't have with another work of art.
And I think the same thing happens outside.
But instead of it being the interaction with other works of art, it's the interaction with the landscape and how the landscape changes.
- Everybody loves a park.
So it's just easy to engage with people that way.
- They don't necessarily come here as an art destination, but that's why I like having art out here.
It's this unexpected encounter that you get to have.
- Even though I've been to the North Carolina Museum of Art more times than I can count, I'd never been to this particular exhibit.
So I saw the cloud chamber on the map and I just knew that I wanted to check it out.
You come in, you shut the door and it feels like nearly complete darkness.
- Every time I go into the cloud chamber, I'm surprised.
To me, it's magic.
It was commissioned in 2003, the centennial of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk.
I started thinking about Chris Drury's work because it's all about the sky.
- The trees on the wall are upside down and on the floor, they're reaching into the sky.
- Upside down?
No, what you're seeing is just the way it should be on the back of what is called a camera obscura.
Or you might just call it a pinhole camera.
- Chris Drury's cloud chamber operates as a room-sized pinhole camera.
And instead of having a pinhole, in the center of the roof is a metal plate and it has a hole in the middle of the plate that's about the size of a quarter.
And when the light from outside goes through the hole, it projects an image of everything above the chamber onto the walls and the floor.
- What started as these vague shapes or shadows are beginning to take form.
- It takes probably 15 or 20 minutes for your for your eyes to fully adapt to the dark.
Then when the image resolves and your eyes adjust, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing.
I was here and documented it when it was being built.
Chris Drury had a mason trimming the stones on site by hand, and then I also got to see this conservation project.
They basically reconstructed the roof with with Chris's guidance.
When I had to photograph the interior of this, I definitely had to use a tripod and it's a very long exposure, like photographing water with a time exposure that like the the leaves become just sort of like an undulating wave rather than discernible individual objects.
- I've been photographing the Eno and Orange and Durham counties for almost 15 years.
This camera is 135 years old.
It's a joy to work with a camera like this and to take the results into a dark room and make a photograph.
The word camera obscura means dark room in Latin.
The 19th century view camera is just another version of this.
It's a very simple machine.
It just has a volume, a room and an opening and a place to view it.
What's great about the cloud chambers is that you get to stand inside the camera.
You know, it's not just looking through the camera, it's being inside the camera, which is really very, very dreamlike.
- It completely shifts your perspective of the world.
Instead of looking up at the sky, you're looking down at it from above and it gives you a completely different vantage point on the world.
- And then you step outside again and it's kind of like you forget like you're in another world for a moment.
- Even as your eyes are adjusting, the world is changing.
- The cloud chamber for the trees and sky is on the campus of the North Carolina Museum of Art at 2110 Blue Ridge Road in Raleigh.
To learn more, go to ncartmuseum.org.
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