traversing sight

I’m an eye. A Mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I coordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads toward the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.
DZIGA VERTOV, FILM DIRECTOR

Traversing space as well as entering space, the thesis inquiry delves into the study of places from multiple perspective representations. I am weaving or collapsing different angles of vision into a structure that can be communicated two dimensionally. Experimenting with various techniques of space distortion and transformation, I am interested in exaggerating and inventing rather than in replicating spaces.

The work visually translates the act of moving through different picture planes and different spatial dimensions. It constructs parallel but dimensional spaces that transition from myopic perspectives which are rendered into points of clarity. As perception depends on optical distances, in all of these dimensional pieces I am building a narrative that it is never accessed from one point of view. The images navigate a space, and necessarily negotiate its multiple faces. They straddle that space through two lens distances, across and within.

Using these different optical devices, I render an experience of landscape through building different constructions. I create an illusory space, a fiction based on real decontextualized spaces, that compresses different places and different times across and within one picture plane. The timelessness of the work takes on an aspective fantasy as well as actuality. The fictive space is a construction that I am launching the viewers within. The place becomes the character, the setting becomes the story. The moments become the sequence, and the repetition and multiple perspectives become the space.

In forming a mapless space of placeless place, the double picture plane constructs layers of sight and allows subsequent layers of accessibility. It is a continuously self generating space, simultaneously an external space of perception and an internal space of reflection.

Informed by architecture, the Holga camera, as well as numerous material studies, I am reconstructing the sense of a visual field and rethinking the graphic plane. Using reconstructions of experienced space, the inquiry analyzes how we re-perceive the external environment. In these newly constructed montages, the optical opportunities allow viewers to engage with these sites. Through framing the picture plane, I am angling the vision of its viewers, and am rethinking the boundaries of experience. Working the picture plane—attempting to overturn the patterned view so that it is no longer a “real” representation—extends the vision of its participants.

The subjects depend on circumstances of discovery: the changing perspectives of constantly traveling through spaces. The discovered images are propelled forward by my movement along a trajectory path. What happening peripherally—through short glimpses in the peripheral frame— brings me inspiration. With a driving intensity to pick up information as it traverses circumstantial landscapes, my constantly moving eye documents all that it sees. With the ever-present camera lens, I capture the dynamic of these shifting perceptions, not only analyzing but responding. Here space and time are codependent and interactive. By walking along these sidewalks, and driving along these freeways I become the narrator and the translator for these circulation paths. I experience them, and make them into other experiences.

At first glance, the photographs appear bluntly straightforward in their documentation of sites, yet they are subtly disorienting. Some of this de-stabilization is accomplished through the use of transparent surfaces and different scales. Shifting the relationship between the viewer and the object viewed, the photographs disrupt the habitual ways in which we perceive familiar surroundings. By confusing spaces that are real spaces with those that are constructed, I ask the viewers to recalibrate their own lenses and consider the ways in which perception and expectation determine how they see as well as what they see. The double exposed picture plane is a kind of looking glass into the everyday environment, seeing the unseen.

THE UNSCENE
I want people to notice something that they have taken for granted by reconstructing it.These places are selected and framed in a manner that estranges them from the familiar.

Why are those places are significant? Days are constructed out of insignificant moments which we don’t always pay attention to. To call attention to these moments, I want to re-frame certain spaces that I have gone through numerous times. These are the spaces where you are neither here nor there, and you don’t pay attention to where you are. I want to bring those moments to attention and to build “ante rooms:” thresholds of transition and reflection. The work becomes a portal for viewing those moments, existing simultaneously between perception and conception. It does not communicate a verbal message, but a pictorial experience. In this constructed threshold, the external space is juxtaposed against the internal frame of mind, creating a moment of respite to facilitate observation.

simultaneous reconstruction

According to Tony Hiss, author of The Experience of Place,
"Our habitual style of thinking, it is often said, is a stream of consciousness pouring and pushing its way through the present. Both the pinpoint of ordinary perception, which lets us shut ourselves away for our surroundings, and the broad-band focus of simultaneous perception, which keeps us linked to our surroundings, are inherited skills built into each of us. Simultaneous perception helps us experience our surroundings and our reaction to them, and not just our own thoughts and desires."

I agree with Hiss in the power of places as emotional experiences. I want to help others become aware of these places through altering their perceptions, and make them conscious for others to see through framing and reconstructing the visual landscape.

I drive. The road horizon seldom varies, and the freeway rarely turns. Four hundred miles to Los Angeles. I drive south, and watch the gradually evolving landscape fly by the window. It is mesmerizing in its mundaness. There is nothing there; yet, I am enchanted. This collection of moments along a fixed routes transforms and evolves. I stare and drive.

Much has been written about driving. Driving along empty stretches of roads, along fields, and through cities. The tilled fields and the tiled rooftops resemble each other in the patterns they construct for the moving eye. But what about those non-scenic by-ways? Those unnoticed un-landmarks in a city? What about the gridlock of a traffic jam? What about congested Foothill Boulevard, a street with non-descript one story wood frame construction? What is scenic about these non-scenic places?

I love moving through space and the feeling of freedom and opportunity that motion provides. The world is not moving. I am moving in the world. Here space and time are codependent and interactive. Through time, the body moves through space. The circulation, the path, the moving along a designated route becomes the source for inspiration. The journey rather than the destination becomes the focus of the studies of circulation. By walking along these sidewalks, and driving along these freeways I become the narrator and the translator for these circulation paths. I experience them, and make them into other experiences. It is a simultaneous reconstruction.

I do not experience this space, this freedom, from quantitative diagrams. Those are abstract notations about the geography, maps that translate topographical features into icons far removed from the experienced moments. With my methodology of working, I am in the site, moving and documenting. By taking photographs, I am not only analyzing, but responding.

My photographs construct new spaces through their layered perspectives and multiple vantage points. They are documenting existing places but then layering those individual sites in new ways which reconstruct them. I am building with photographs rather than with walls. I want to build dimension, and pedestrian experience. I also want to capture in a compressed format what is normally perceived in a longer duration. Extending the moment and compressing the moment, as a way of defining space are my approaches for this reconstruction. The place becomes the character, the setting becomes the story. The moments become the sequence, and the repetition and multiple perspectives become the space. The fragments becomes the wholes, the isolated instants become the linked compositions.

Most graphic design tries to communicate a message in the easiest, most comprehendible route possible. I want to extend that communication—that moment of translation—into an experience in itself. I want to create a dimensional space—a multi perspective, multilateral space—in a medium which functions usually linearly and flatly. I want the picture to communicate, without a necessary verbal narrative. I want the space of my page to interact with the viewer how a building’s space interacts with its participant.

The subject matter I chose to accomplish this with is exterior landscape. If I can reconstruct an everyday, or non-destination place and let it transform on the page, the page will become dimensional. On the surface it looks like any nondescript street scene, but things are not what they appear at first glance. They are layered, multiplied, contrasted against each other’s scale. According to Rudy Vanderlans, "The iteration of the images so leveraged simulates a spatiality that transcends the ordinary two-dimensional page."

A person does not fully comprehend their world from one point of view, one simple glance, or one photograph. They understand it by putting together puzzle pieces—differing perspectives, and seemingly incongruous facts and moments. They construct their own reality based on the addition of these separate elements. And, this is where that new space, or that new interpretation is interactive and subjective. The photographs are fairly representational in their nature; only in their reconfiguration does the documentation transform the landscape into something new. I want people to notice something that they have taken for granted by reconstructing it.

serial space as aspectual space

Inhabiting what the artist has dubbed “pedestrian space”—the ordinary matter-of-fact space coextensive with that of the spectator and of the site—the sculptures reveal themselves over time, from different vantages, and according to different perspectives. They address themselves to the particular space and time that they’re in. They are constructed in time slowly, and any apprehension of the works involves a process of kinesthetic viewing, a phenomenological experiencing of each piece in situ. The body of work is informed by a signature style and yet, as a result of the close interdependence of each piece with the architectural site in which it is realized, ever different in its manifestations. Lynne Cook on Fred Sandberg

In relentlessly probing issues of similarity and difference, likeness and identity, Judd required that each of his works be closely and attentively scrutinized. The recognition of the specificity of each element informs the viewer’s appreciation of the relation of the individual to the collective, of the singular entity to the larger series, and of repetition to order. “Aspectual diversity”—the sequence of distinct vantage points required to navigate each work, and to negotiate its multiple faces, in an engagement that necessarily takes place in real time and actual space—plays a fundamental role in the apprehension of his work. Lynne Cook on Donald Judd

The spectator experiences an object in space through time, through duration, and through multiple perspectives. Through physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement, the spectator’s vision is peripatetic and spatial. It is not reduced to framing a singular moment. Appearances change radically as the viewer explores each element in the sequence. The sequence, or seriality, of distinct vantage points takes place in real time and real space, and allows the construction and translation of place. As a result of these multiple perspectives, the spectator is provided an "exploration of extended duration."

Dependent on multiplicity and seriality, this “pedestrian space” concerns orientation and movement. Multiple vantage points are constructed from similarity and difference. In these “multipartite entities,” the differences between parts are the subjects of the composition.

Multiplicity constructs multidimensionality and multiple realities. I am interested in using fragments and wholes to build space through multiple views and multiple times. The translation of 3D space into 2D space, which retains the sense of spatiality and multiplicity, is the means with which I plan to study this. Utilizing isolated moments framed through the passage of time constructs a cohesive experience. Just as a building has a circulation spine which is not an particular instance but an integrated addition of individual parts, I hope to expand the moment and construct tangible time through the multiple layering of fragments.