Shower

Overview

Shower is one of a group of five works Whitman made between 1963 and 1964 in which films were projected onto physical objects. It shows a film of a woman taking a shower, projected from the rear onto a curtain, behind which water cascades inside a metal shower stall. At one point, the water turns to colored paint, which pours over the woman and then washes off of her as it quickly reverts to water. This dramatic moment, intercut with close-up shots of the drain and shower head, evokes both the painterly happenings of the early 1960s and the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller movie Psycho (1960).