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.