ABSTRACT FILMS
In these turbulent, maddening and horrifying times, I have found solace in making abstract art and exploring light and color and how they interact with and transform each other.
Still Lives
I film configurations of pitchers, bottles, and bowls on a table as the light of the sun moves across them. I film in real time. It takes 2 – 4 hours for the sun to move completely across. I then layer them with variations of visual effects until they are abstracted and strikingly beautiful. Light is vibrating and shifting around us all the time, though our brains largely filter out these pulsations, so that we experience the world as solid and only slowly changing. While our eyes are capable of detecting a single photon, our brain recognizes only the larger effects of light.
The visual effects that I use interact with the infinitesimal changes of the light and make them visible, more evident. This is what our eyes see, which our brains ignore and make ordinary. I am restoring and making evident the actual sense impressions to the visual so that the extraordinary and the sensual re-emerge. This is not some random effect of AI, but determined, deliberate choices made by me. Some of the Still Lifes are speeded up versions. The real time files are immense and can’t always be uploaded.
Color Fields
The color fields embody three different phenomena simultaneously. First, they explore how the juxtaposition of colors changes how our brains experience each of the colors. Second, the colors slowly metamorphose, as the original color and the destination color mix in degrees as the original color progresses toward the destination color. Third, as the viewer stares at the image and as they move closer or farther away from the screen or blink, the fields pulsate and move. The objects on the screen are not moving, but the brain deals with information that is both static and changing at the same time by transforming the image in an attempt to reconcile conflicting sense data. The color fields are inspired by the work of Josef Albers and Mark Rothko but differ from them in that I also explore duration and change over time. All the color field films follow the same pattern – 2 minutes of the original colors, 10 minutes of transformation, then 2 minutes of the destination colors.
