THE SPACE OF DAYS (2013)
Home is a duration.
Home is a narrative body.
Home is porous.
This is a recording.
The Space of Days employs a multi-format approach to photographic image making to represent the vernacular world of everyday objects, and their role in punctuating our domestic narratives.
Ideas defining Anton Giulio Bragaglia's Photodynamism, Gaston Bachelards's Poetics of Space, and Walter Benjamin's Optical Unconscious, are conflated to illustrate the way in which objects can populate, and be containers for, a domestic theater. Cinema encroaches on these objects, quietly alluding to another narrative form that occupies the interstitials of the everyday.
PORTRAIT: BRIGITTE BARDOT & DORIAN GRAY (2009)
This work presents a dual portrait of Brigitte Bardot and Dorian Gray.
The portrait of Brigitte Bardot is visually defined by the ambient luminescence from a bank of monitors that are playing four films in which she plays the starring role. These films run simultaneously through their individual durations. Their cumulative luminescence occupies a wall hanging vatrine-like box that provides the pictorial space for the work. The principle auditory experience is defined by the cacophony of the four soundtracks running together.
The sculpture contains a headset, which plays the audio from Albert Lewin's 1945 cinematic production of Oscar Wilde’s novel. The video version of Dorian Gray that is presented in this work is Audio Described for the Visually Impaired. It provides narration for all actions and events that take place in the film. While listening to the headset, the pictorial space, and luminescence therein, is transformed, creating an associative space for the viewer's mental images to take form.
The work creates a corollary between the fictional character of Dorian Gray and the fictionalized character of Brigitte Bardot through notions of aestheticism and idealized beauty (both physical and representational), the immortalization of portraiture, amorous excess, ugliness, veneer, and the double life that defines both characters portrayed in the work.
Portrait: Brigitte Bardot and Dorian Gray additionally explores ideas relating to conventions of pictorial representation, viewership, mimesis and diegesis, and the relationship between image and light.
ARCHITECTURAL CINEMA (2009)
These works obscure conventions relating to viewership, the presentation of photographic images and the physical and perceptual space in which photographic and cinematic images are understood. The work constructs a perceptual paradox creating a set of relationships based around a 3-d photograph. The effect of the anaglyph 3-d image is a perceived descent through the architectural space of the gallery, into a secondary architectural space—an empty movie theater. Conversely, the work presents an extension of the physical architecture of the gallery into the viewer's space, and the space of the artwork.
The physical anaglyph photograph and the perceptual effect of the 3-d is mitigated by the architectural space of the wall. That image is compromised further by the representational space of the non-anaglyph photograph. The non-anaglyph photograph uses photographic illusionism to create a perceived window onto a view outside the physical space of the gallery.
The spectrum of pictorial possibility is another focus of these works. It presented through the potential cinematic event presented in the anaglyph photograph, and the "impossible" vision of the non-anaglyph photograph.
ASCENSIONS II (2009)
This work presents a deconstructed cinematic narrative that recomposes basic features of cinema in ways that are partially adherent to cinematic structures. The work is defined by a set of photographic images that are presented in a sequential order to suggest the serialized frames of a motion picture. The work employs strobe lights in certain positions within the sequence that facilitate a sense of movement in the still images, yet they optically complicate the viewer's ability to observe the photographs.
The sequence creates a loosely defined narrative scheme that appears as a cinematic fragment. The sequence of photos uses a dramatic scheme found in mainstream cinema to achieve a charged, and incomplete narrative. Several images exhibit a cubist formalism to advance the repetitious structure and deconstructive strategy at play in the work.
TRANSMISSION REFLEX: SPRING IS HERE (2009)
This kinetic sculpture is an allegory for an attempted communication. The video projection employs a system of encryption based on Morse Code to transmit a written message.
Using short and long impulses, the projection sends the message upward. It is incrementally thwarted by the convex mirror that travels through the plane of the projection. Moving images occupy the space between the words.
CINEMA MACHINE (2007 - 2008)
Cinema Machine: Heirloom extracts antiquated forms, architectural features and technology from image making devices and image distribution systems, synthesizing them into an automated sculptural object. The result redefines their function and our relationship to them.
Drawing from both photographic and cinematic sources, the Cinema Machine fuses these modes of imaging, on the basis of their mutual influence on our contemporary perceptions of history, via the legacy of still and moving images. The obsolescence of these forms suggests an era that produced and distributed a multitude of images, and image-making traditions. That production now provides a contemporary viewership with a familiar canon of images—a photo- cinematic history.
The Cinema Machine reformulates the experience of moving images, in a manner specifically oriented to the clearly defined operation of the cinema. This work takes a theater- based paradigm and rearticulates it into an automated sculptural object. The object replicates specific aspects of the cinematic event, and upends others.
The Cinema Machine exhibits a loosely constructed narrative that is born out of interplay between two sets of photographic images. One set presents images appropriated from American Western films made during the 1920's-1950's, and the second set are self-authored aerial photographs of the local area. This "filmic" content, defined by a checkerboard grid of images,
suggests a weaving—a legacy object—an heirloom. The composite portrays a likeness of a topographical map, which exhibits an ahistorical vision of the ephemeral boundary that exists between altered and unaltered landscape.
The images presented portray a shift in the perception of our physical environment, through distinct pictorial perspectives. The cinematic images portray a frontal perspective that is normative to cinematic pictorialism, in contrast to the aerial photography that utilizes bird's eye perspective, a pictorial mode that is unique to our current visual consciousness. The images convey a contrast defined by the incidental documentarianism contained in the tradition of narrative cinema, in relation to the intentional documentarinism of aerial photography, cartography and satellite imaging.
The work employs industrial automation technologies to actuate the cinematic event within the sculptural object. There are multiple projection devices housed within the ticket booth that operate on a conglomerate of timing sequences. The use of automation in the piece also serves to question the degree to which the cinematic event is defined by human exchange, in spite of the machine-based optical experience of the cinema . Here, electro-mechanical engineering replaces the human element in the cinematic experience, thus negating the expectation for human immediacy. It additionally disrupts the economic exchange that is the basis for commercial cinema.
The work is designed to portray itself as an inanimate object that is activated during the course of the viewer’s experience, consequently transforming the art object into a revised form of spectacle.
LANDSCAPE INVERSIONS AND VOIDS (2009 - 2010)
The optical manipulation that define these images reflect an inquiry into the nature of vision, viewership and photographic representation. The visual effects are produced optically, without the aid of digital imaging software.
Landscape Inversions pictorially express issues relating to our retinal registration of visual information. This work also engages with historical considerations in photographic image making, specifically the camera obscura and the reflex.
Landscape Voids mitigate the illusionism of a photographic simulacrum, and the photographic image-object. These works additionally suggest visual deficiency in observation of the natural world. A redefined illusionistic operation takes place, which is actuated by the competition between image and absence.
VACANT ATTRACTIONS (2007)
Vacant Attractions is a body of work in photography that examines the implementation of human manufactured landscapes as decoration, in the American West. Informed by the tradition of the Romantic Landscape, in painting and photography, the work reassesses and subverts core tenets of the genre based on contemporary manifestations and usages of landscape.
The work highlights a development in public space that presides along new roadway developements throughout the Front Range region. Though almost indistinguishable from public parks, these highly ordered utopian landscapes are distinct in that they are completely void of human interaction. The consequence is that these ranging Edenesque spaces become a unique synthesis between landscape and decorative garden.
Despite the allure of their contrived beauty, there lurks an imminent danger in these spaces due to their total disregard for the surrounding ecosystem. Their unsustainability makes them emblematic of human interaction with the natural landscape in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
VIEWS: DOMESTIC REALITIES (2005)
This body of work explores the limits and inadequacies of photographic and moving images as representational modes, while simultaneously considering how these media inform our understandings of extreme factual realities.
Using appropriated cinematic imagery, these images engage with the social function and visual aesthetics of War Cinema, within the static articulation of a color photograph. The work intends to situate itself in the mode of documentary war photography, but the image making process is marred by a set of removals from the work's acute subject matter: the activities of war.
Views: Domestic Realities confronts issues relating to reportage, cinematic representation, duration, locality, and the vehicles in which representations of war are created and consumed.