Collaboration with photographer: Apolline Fjara (FR), currently living in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland.
This series of images was made with the early photographic studies of movement in mind, inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge from the late 19th century. How would he describe the movement & motion of someone lost in time & space, the motion of a time traveler? As we move on the Earth’s surface, our planet is traveling around the sun, inside our Solar system traveling in an infinite incomprehensible space. Time is curved, curling & waving, a linear sense of time perception is lost.
Apolline had begun the process of conceptualizing the project before we had crossed paths. At the time of my residency, I was exploring movement based procedures through the act of walking, standing, lying down, running & gestures in response to gravity. These practices are based on my education as an Alexander Technique practitioner. When Apolline approached me to ‘perform’ these concepts & explorations the collaboration was seemingly preordained, as if the projected timeline of the body of work was already set in motion. There is something to be said about the way in which there is a symbiotic connection of artistic expression beyond time & space. Through our intuitive collaboration we are imagining & embodying an existence beyond space time. For Aristotle, time is nothing other than a measurement of change. If nothing changes is there no time? That ‘when’ & ‘where’ are always located in relation to something hence we are able to locate ourselves in relation to the expansive universe. What about the Newtonian sense of deep time? One that is mathematical & absolute. Time that flows independently of change, both internally and externally, how then do we locate ourselves here, there, when & where? The pictures are the result of double exposure on black & white 35mm analog film.
The full roll was exposed for the first time with pictures of images from a book about time, astronomy & relativity theory with a full 35mm frame camera. Apolline started by scanning the illustrations & diagrams, reversing them into a negative format, projecting them onto a large screen & then photographing the projected images. This time consuming approach to the body of work adds to the conceptual gravity of the project from its first conception.
The roll was then exposed again with a half frame camera, with pictures of my movements in a dark area, light only focused on the body. Light & sound become other aspects of abstract time based measurement we play with in this series. The location was an ‘empty’ abandoned silo. We had one independent source of light in the center of the nucleus.Through illuminating the body’s movements & gestures, experimenting with speed & stillness, clarity & blur. Sound cannot be heard in these still images. The body’s language & double exposure of sketches, graphs & diagrams illustrates this abstraction of time. Just as the sound of an airplane can be heard, before visually seen, we are sending out vocal signals to the contained space we occupy, the resonant loop bounces back, there we are located in time & space.
The roll was developed with high agitation rates to increase contrast, so the marks of the double exposure are really discrete. That way, each frame’s marks nearly disappear & blend with the black background. Full stripe of the film can be then considered as one image, with different exposures blending into one image. Each composition was left to chance, combined with the playfulness of order & chaos.
The camera used for this project was an Olympus pen F. Double exposure on film (ilford 3200).
Click to enlarge
