River Redux

Back in studio and going over residency notes. I decided to go back and have a second go round with the Hudson River series. In each panel I have taken 12 files and layered them on top of each other, lightening the opacity so you can see one through the other.

 Each paired panel represents the sky and water of the 6 locations I have so far covered. So in one image you are viewing about an hour of the river. The two on the left represent all of the images layered on top of each other.

Here is a detail of the two images that have all the images layered.

Hope you get the idea.

OHHH Oregon

December is here so quickly and it's crunch time! So what was the last 6 months if not crunch?? I'm sure I am not the only one who feels they work all the time and never catch up.

So I’ve been home from Oregon for almost a month now and finally getting around to posting this.

This video represents an 8 channel video that I would like to install using 8 stacked monitors. So you have to use a bit of your imagination. I certainly am because I have no idea where I think I'm getting 8 monitors from.

This represents one hour of time on the river. It's really such a beautiful river. Very different from the Hudson. I have more footage from another day that I hope to get to this weekend.

Willamette from Rita Maas on Vimeo.

I also put together this print. It measures 17” x 74”

Home to darkeness

This past month I was fortunate enough to travel to Los Angeles. While in LA Super Storm Sandy hit our area fairly hard. We returned to a home without power. Three days later, eight inches of snow fell. I slipped on a patch of ice while shoveling the driveway and hurt my wrist which is now in puffed up to twice its size and in a brace (had x-rays, no fracture) It is difficult to type this as my fingers keep missing the keys. Between being away and then being dislocated by the storm, I’m feeling a bit disconnected and unfocused. I feel I lost a bit of my momentum and am trying to get back up to speed. The internet just came back on today.

While in LA I photographed the Pacific Ocean. I am posting Atlantic and Pacific Oceans here one on top of the other BUT in installation I want to project these on opposite walls of a narrow room, restricting the viewer’s sight line. The overall length will be about 20 feet. Seeing them here may be a bit underwhelming and you need to image it as a room of crashing ocean. I want to engage the viewer in his or her own sense of perception. One cannot see the imagery in its entirety but must scan the surface, experiencing a decentralized gaze. The ocean and sky are photographed in a straightforward documentary manner. In each video the same section of ocean and sky are photographed and rephotographed over a time span of about an hour.  My intent is to display a kind of inventory of time, a layered temporal experience. The water is photographed in a downward perspective and the sky, looking up. When edited together in a grid flattens and abstracts the vastness of the ocean.

Atlantic:Pacific from Rita Maas on Vimeo.

After LA we traveled north to Portland Oregon where I photographed the Willamette River. More about that soon, I hope.

What is "realistic?"

Landscapes and seascapes are a ubiquitous subject for photographers, close second and third to sunsets no doubt. So here I am photographing the Hudson River and wondering what it all adds up to. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I am interested in what it means to think, see and filter through ideas and images as we seek understanding of our digital world. We navigate through images and materials in a kind of impromptu, uncharted fashion. Connections and associations are often made in random, accidental ways. Our perceptions of our world is often experienced or learned through our digital devises. It is as if we are depending on already processed information, not on direct experiences. It is as if our understanding of our world were a ghost of the “real” thing. How does this shape who we are? How does it shift the way we spatially relate to our world? How does it affect our behavior?

I would like to project my videos large so the viewer cannot take it in all at once, but must scan the surface with their eyes. Our understanding of our world (things, people, landscapes and ideas) are not fixed but mutable, active and fluid. I present the river and sky as fragments; always as a partial rendition. I intend to photograph the river from Beacon NY down to the Battery of Manhattan. So far I have photographed seven sites. When I have all the locales (my goal is 12) I will edit them together to make a flowing “whole.” A river is the same river at its mouth and at its source yet it is never the same, it is a constantly changing cycle. These images will never capture the full identity of the river.

I began to make small 4x6” prints of some screen shots of the video to help me sequence them. They act as a sort of storyboard. I laid them out on the floor of my studio in an attempt to get a visual of the overall piece.  I was not intending to make single prints from these images but somehow I have grown fond of these as still images. While the video allows a temporal, layered experience, the stills become all surface. I resisted the print idea at first as I felt I would miss the light of the projector and the movement of the video but these prints have become their own quiet statement. A photograph can only present a surface and I am thinking I want to play with the idea of the surface of the photograph and the surface of the water. The sky becomes a surface as well.

 I don’t know how large I will make these but they will be grouped in threes and fours. These are work prints and are a bit sloppy. 

If a tree falls....

If a tree falls and almost hits your house and everyone inside is wearing ear buds while tethered to their personal devises, does it make a sound? This and other questions to ponder in the 21^st century.
This actually happened to a friend of mine. She came home from work to discover that an 80 foot tree had fallen, missing her house by less than 3 feet. Her husband and 2 teenage daughters, home at the time, were oblivious to what had happened. Safe inside the shelter of their home they each pursued their personal and individual interests…intensely...isolated. Connected and disconnected at the same time. Now I do not suggest that anything is really amiss here, just interesting to notice. We have, as a culture, become more and more disconnected to the physical world around us. We interact with and experience much of our world through a screen. I am not suggesting we run for the hills, kiss a tree, jump in a lake and become technical luddites. I am suggesting we take notice of how much of our lives we have handed over to our devises. As our devises get smarter and smarter, are we getting dumber? We have assigned many functions to our devises that, in the past, we would have performed ourselves. Remembering phone numbers, appointments and the simple task of getting from one place to another are taken care of for us.  Have we become passengers in our own lives? We no longer navigate through our own world. We follow the highlighted route. We are less and less connected to the terrain we travel and, as a result, understand it more and more abstractly. Again, I want to stress I am not being critical of this phenomenon and suggest no answer, I only am wondering. I am suggesting we slow down, after all, if life were a race; do we really want to reach the finish line first?

Our relationship with our surroundings is becoming more and more fractured. My work this semester has brought me to the river, a place I love. Yet, I spend more time (a lot more) looking at the river on the computer than I actually spend on the river filming it. I am thinking about the space between how we interact with our physical world and how we experience it.

HR Ossining from Rita Maas on Vimeo.

There are 2 additional videos on vimeo if you care to take a look. These are experiments.  I had a very productive meeting with my mentor yesterday discussing them at length. I am feeling there are 3-4 separate ideas here that can be sorted out and handled individually. These are different treatments of the same footage from my last post. I am trying to figure out where I want this to go before I go out and film again. My next task is to focus on the sequence of each piece as well as the installation specifics. The installation component will shift the experience of viewing them. Seeing them on your computer is less than ideal.

Ebb & Flow

 The river is everywhere all at once, at the source and at the mouth, constantly moving, ever changing yet always the same.
 I grew up on the Great South Bay on Long Island. The water was always part of my life. I would watch it change in appearance though the days and seasons, shifting from choppy grey to still, glassy blue, to frozen chalky white. It was a constant, always there.

I now live closer to the Hudson River and  I started photographing it this past month. Each visit evokes a new experience. I have gone to different locations along its bank. I generally prefer the morning when the water is calm and the light is soft. I am interested in showing the river over time but showing it all at once. The two minute video was filmed over an almost two hour time span. It shows the same spot on the river, the same patch of sky, changing with the conditions. The sound of the passing train marks time as it keeps its schedule. The river is oblivious to this; it continues to flow.

HR OSSINING1 from Rita Maas on Vimeo.


In looking at this video I wasn’t sure I liked the abrupt line between the sky and the water. I had a conversation with my advisor recently about Agnes Martin. I had said her canvases (which I love) had no horizon line. She was quick to correct me, saying they had multiple horizons. Of course! I went back to the footage and reworked the editing. Here I spliced together the water and sky with multiple horizon lines. I am not sure it achieves anything the first did not but I do like the duck that comes in around 1:40. In the end I feel it’s a little gimmicky. Nice try.

HR OSSINING2 from Rita Maas on Vimeo.

I have more footage from other locations along the river. This edit is footage from Croton on Hudson and Irvington from two different days. We think of time as linear, one moment following the next. Our concept of time has become some what elastic. The relationship between  past, present and future is something that can be dismantled and reassembled. That is what I am attempting to achieve here in my work on the river. 

HR CROT IRV from Rita Maas on Vimeo.

I am looking at these experiments and wondering if they are achieving what I intend. I am attempting to disrupt a perceived linear experience of time yet I have lined them up…. Need to figure this out. There are a few things I like about it. As much as I would like to believe they are elegant, I can’t help but feel they are rigid and timid.

I have decided to pick up “The Poetics of Space” again. It has been on my reading list for over a year. When I opened it up again I found my bookmark on page 3! Guess I didn’t get past the introduction.

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.