Ocean View

I had a good meeting with my mentor last week (a bit abbreviated as I arrived late). She has encouraged me to write often about my work, a practice that I have allowed to fall fallow in recent months.

It has always been a concern of mine to accentuate the differences between how our eyes see, or how we experience vision, and how the camera sees. The camera records what is in front of it. Vision is constantly active. It is continuous. It is in constant motion as it scans and focuses. What we “see” is a construction, a perception of what is present before us in relation to ourselves. To look is an act of choice.

The camera, on the other hand, records (or sees) what ever is in front of it, all of it, all at once for a specific duration. I choose to use the camera as a tool to devise a scheme to present what I want to see but cannot. I want to make images of what I want to see.

Here I have photographed the Atlantic Ocean. Instead of recording multiple sections and piecing them together, as I did in the past videos, I have re-photographed the same section of ocean and sky over a period of an hour and half. I then reassembled the clips creating a vista of time rather than space. The Ocean is presented as a linear sequence of time. I use the grid as an armature of organization. The vastness of the ocean is flattened.

 Ideally I would like to project this piece using four projectors onto one large wall. Don’t ask me where I think I’m getting the four projectors or the large wall. My mentor, who is an installation artist using photography, has encouraged me to make models of this to get a better understanding of scale. Seeing it here, on your computer, is not the best. The sound here has improved so if you have headphones or ear buds you might want to use them to hear the stereo. There is another one of the Hudson River on my vimeo site you can look at if you like. I am not as happy with it. Yesterday I spent 5 hours on the Hudson River re-photographing it. I will hopefully have that up next week. In the mean time, I better get working on my paper.

Atlantic Ocean 40.8025-73.8693 from Rita Maas on Vimeo.

Dog Days of August

I have been grappling with this idea of making a photograph of what I want to see. The camera can see things in a way that I cannot and vise versa. In these 12 channel videos I am piecing together clips of a scene that you could not see at all once. Each clip represents an exact time and place distinct from the one besides it. Time is represented as both present and past simultaneously.  I am very interested in the use of the grid structure to obtain perspective and allowing it to flatten out as surface and light. I am thinking about the idea of experience and perception. Sound is an important component of how we establish and understand our surroundings. Last week a friend told me that sound is the only sense that can actually enter our bodies. I think light also enters our bodies and you could argue for taste too but I think I know what she means. Sound can actually resonate within us and be felt within us.

These four videos are actually two pairs. Reservoir and Reservoir Sky will be projected together, one on top of the other. Sprinkler and Trees will do the same. I intentionally left out a horizon line to remove that anchor of balance. The day I recorded the trees and sprinkler it was super hot and the air was as still as a dead cockroach. There was a tree guy down the street chipping what sounded like an entire forest. I recorded the sound separately early the next day before the leaf blowers and lawn movers are allowed to operate. You can still hear surface noise from cars going by and maybe a plane overhead. It’s interesting how I have become much more aware of all the different noises around me while doing this project. I am thinking I will return to these sights and record them again under different conditions.

I’m still working out a lot of details on this project and want to explore different ways of approaching it. I am begining to understand the obstacles. There are a lot of variables I would like to dig a little deeper into. I think I need to push the concept a bit. I am finding that as I approach a subject I am processing  how to section it off into spaces that I can record and reassemble  in order to render as a flat image. I feel as I continue doing this I will figure out different approaches.  I am thinking one thing I will do is head over to the Hudson River and do something over there.

Reservoir - Mac and PC from Rita Maas on Vimeo.

Res-wat
Tree - Mac and PC from Rita Maas on Vimeo.
er - Mac and PC from Rita Maas on Vimeo.


Sprinkler - Mac and PC from Rita Maas on Vimeo.