In a flash
a future opens up
but you’ve just as soon missed it
a moment between
stolen twilight
borrowed dawn
in a flash
one consciousness flickers into another
green opportunity
green between
don’t blink
don’t think
the pinprick of the moment-of-becoming happens
in a flash
explode the moment
stay a while
– MRN/MW
Joseph lights Sarah’s cigarette with the Sun.
In-camera investigations of (filmic) nature. Rustic homages to early avant-garde landmarks and wild landscapes of the 21st Century. – PM
“Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.” – Michael Green, MCA Chicago
In Transfer of Attention a crumbling handmade facsimile of a golden beet is held against the sky in place of and in opposition to the sun. Over the course of the video I use my hands as surrogates for the viewers desire to touch and understand a distant object, investigating the slowly disintegrating calcium carbonate sun until nothing remains but the traces of yellow dust. In this video and my practice in general I am interested in investigating the space between what your mind can fathom and what your body can perceive and produce, the distance between the feeling of a rock and the knowledge of a mountain. Placing my hands directly on the objects is a small effort to close the gap between the viewer and the vastly unattainable, and yet there still remains distance as the objects are obscured from the viewers eye by the act of touching itself. In Transfer of Attention the object is completely worn away, disappeared by the act of attempting to gain information through touch, only to reappear again and again, a slightly different form against a slightly different sky. – RS
Despite the oppressive heat of the late afternoon on the hills of Marseille, the cicadas keep on singing. The overexposed video, burnt by the bite of the sun, reveals mixtures of unreal colors that meets the distorted cicadas melody. – JMR
New York, Summer 2014
A small video camera is slowly destroyed by focused sunlight, reenacting / interpreting one of Isaac Newton’s early investigations into the nature of light and visual perception.
Isaac Newton – in an undated letter to John Locke:
The manner was this. I looked a very little while upon ye sun in a looking glass wth my right eye & then turned my eyes into a dark corner of my chamber & winked to observe the impression made & the circles of colours wch encompassed it & how they decayed by degrees & at last vanished. in a few hours time I had brought my eys to such a pass that I could look upon no bright object with either eye but I saw ye sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover ye use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together & used all means to divert my imagination from ye Sun. But now I have been very well for many years, tho I am apt to think that if I durst venture my eyes I could still make ye phantasm return by the power of my fansy. –TD
A videogame: Avoid the sun during the day. At night collect the burnt bodies of other creatures for food. 3D textures are made with cyanotypes, images rendered through the sun’s UV rays. – AO
