Digital Portland Art Museum Projection Screens

Suspending thousands of pounds of steel and wood overhead always carries inherent risk — but this project required translating a deeply specific artistic vision into a safe, public-facing structure. For Pipilotti Rist’s installation at the Portland Art Museum, the projection screens needed to appear amorphous, edgeless, and paper-thin, while remaining structurally sound enough for visitors to safely recline beneath them. Honoring the artist’s intent with an illusion of weightlessness and dissolution, while meeting strict safety, engineering, and museum standards created a complex fabrication and rigging challenge.

Figure Plant partnered closely with structural engineers, museum stakeholders, and the artist’s team to translate a poetic vision into a safe, buildable system. Through custom fabrication, precise assembly, and carefully planned rigging, we created projection screens that meet stringent safety requirements while maintaining the artist’s intent: an uninterrupted, paper-thin form that feels suspended rather than supported.

Installed on the museum’s fourth floor, 4th Floor to Mildness appears to float effortlessly above the space, transforming how visitors experience both the artwork and their own bodies in relation to gravity. The installation marked Pipilotti Rist’s West Coast premiere and only the second presentation of this work in the United States, inviting guests to lie back, look up, and engage from an entirely new physical perspective.

According to the Portland Art Museum, Rist’s work explores how perception shifts when we no longer have to “stand or fight gravity,” imagining the body dissolving into “water, mud, slime, molecules, and atoms.” The result is an immersive environment that feels both technically precise and emotionally expansive.

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