Rooted in the familiar and relatively affordable slideshow genre of vernacular photography, slide projection as a new artistic medium appealed to Melchert. A number of artist contemporaries in the US and abroad would take radically different approaches to slide formats and content. Melchert explained that with the time-based medium of slide projection, “the entire venture stemmed from how we all used slides in those days to remember our trips and family visits.” In Melchert’s body of approximately twenty slide pieces created during the first half of the 1970s, he engaged his friends and family in doing things he asked, recording these structured actions and routine gestures. The presence of his personal and artistic social spheres lent the culminating works with a quality of warmth, not to mention fun, while exploring formal ideas of perspective, sequencing, and transparent flat pictorial space versus real space. –Tanya Zimbardo from her essay Choreographed Play: Jim Melchert’s Projection and Performance Works