HORIZONS Installation

HORIZONS is a three part photo-based series meditating on solar energy, space and ways of seeing social structures ecologically.  The three elements include prints made from overexposed polaroid film, timelapse sequences composited into single images and video loops. These abstractions of light don’t rely on the rules of photographic process such as reciprocity or the same philosophy of time. Their creation is part of an ongoing experimental approach to the role of light in society and how people spatially relate to environment issues associated with the changing modern world.

Each polaroid goes through several cycles of recording light.  It is extremely overexposed and pointed directly at the sun to capture, not the path of the sun, but the transformative energy radiating from it. The resulting instant print is then scanned and enlarged to create a more atmospheric experience for the viewer.

Timelapse composites combine slivers of each picture in a timelapse sequence to create a single image portraying multiple levels of time passage. The works reveals 24 hours of smog accumulation in Beijing, sunsets in the desert and the bare sky changing color from pollution. Their atmospheric quality create the framework to see solar phenomena through an aesthetic lens, but not devoid of concern.

The videos have a strong photographic element due to their static scenery, activated through the repetition of the short video on an infinite loop. Dyspnea was made from altering a single picture of the sun into variations of the original and producing a video from the sequence of variations, whereas Joining Two Horizons was produced in tandem with a photograph of the same scene.

HORIZONS features works made in 2012 during time spent as a Phoenix photographer in the valley of the sun, a resident artist in China and a non-religious traveler in Israel.

NOTE:
This exhibition was a mash up of several experiences and approaches to image making. It compiled many of the concepts I had addressed in Smoke & Mirrors without the reference point of a city or specific point in time. I wanted this show to somehow shrink the world under our feet and at the same time expanding how people can see the sky. I used an adaptation of the monofilament levitation technique to install the polaroid prints above eye level and at a slight angle. This created a dynamic in the gallery that felt a little like a church, which was highlighted by the streaming source of flickering light of the projector playing a looping video of the sun breathing.