I wish you said what you told us. When you construct something within the space, or by turning or twisting it, you make me see more, or to appreciate, or to understand. For example, if there is a continuity of landscape horizon, and suddenly something interferes, in a way this horizon line connects with another horizon, and there is a box (looking at project for Lucy’s class, week 1) I begin to see the image and appreciate it in different ways, that normally I would not do.
In your processes you have 180 degrees, but your camera only has 90 degrees in the widest lens , so that means, bringing framing whatever way you do it, and then within that image, when you crop it, it becomes stronger. You do that simultaneously in one space, that is what is interesting to me.
Have you seen Chermayoff’s “number 9?” That is a different material, but conceptually similar to what you are doing. He puts a minimalist red structure in front of a building, and makes us to begin to think about the number, space, building. Because of the object intervention, we look at the space in a different way.
A: (brings up the idea of site) It transforms the place, and walking around it, and being interested in seeing through the holes in the 9, and how you perceive the building with/without the number 9.
H: Did you try with video as well?
A: I was thinking that because this one was hanging on the tee, it kept moving, and that was shifting. Keep the camera still, because this moving in the window, it was changing what was in it,
H: I would do that.
The mirror is a tremendously interesting strategy, take a look at Citizen Kane, Tom Wedell’s favorite movie, seeing through the window, at the very end, so when the real image and the not real image gets lost. There is something that connects to your thesis.
A: They are not finished as these digital files, shows NY Chelsea holga photos
Shifting scale and creating these multiples in one image simultaneously, looking at places transitions, such as the roads, highways, nondescript places that you take for granted, walking down the street, driving down the highway, these are mundane scenarios that you as through, I want to raise awareness for people to re-look at that space, and that relates back to the film I did, about the commuter rail, looking at how people take that space for granted, it is the space of motion.
H: There is a fascination with what you see in the mirror, you also see here. The places you don’t know the boundaries of the image, one image but within the image there are many images. That’s what fascinates me about your studies. There is something dramatic about these pieces, scale, relationships. It is amazing that your first study you are taking it further on, there must be something you really care about.
A: I think, I like the idea, that they all start reading, for example, the density of the image makes me think of speed, it has a lot of density, a lot of different scales of perspectives. Street, signs, cabs, overpasses. One of them is really dense, and that to me describes the Manhattan cityscape. I was looking at these overpasses, it seems to be the idea of constructing and reconstructing the space, in a very structural way. Using the buildings as elements, as lines, like here, for example, the overpasses, and so they became these sight lines. They break it up in a very cubist/structural fashion, like the buildings.
H: This could be a thesis for architecture school.
A: I feel like learn to build with walls, now I am building with photography, constructing with what there. I am adding to it with the mirror or the way I am framing it, but I am not going out adding building materials, the world is a site as I see it.
H: I am looking at narrative of space, you should look at architecture slang, you are using “mise-en-scene,” and now I am seeing a lot of that in architecture, the issue of a whole article of mise-en-scene of a space. There is a lot of that here.
A: I kind of did the same thing here. These are similar to frames in a movie, since I was doing movies in wintersession I was looking at film strips, they are double exposed in the frame. I became interested to see another way of multiplying
H: One is montage, and the other is collage. Montage is where borders are clear, borders are boxes. Collage are when the borders overlap, and they go inside each other. The difference is that one is about linearity of narrative, and one is about simultaneity of image structure.
A: They don’t integrate. The ocotmat is a montage.
I think that this part is interesting. Me driving, looking out the window with the overpass. It is all in motion. Those are the two camera modes which make it work as a series. The reconstruction is a building method.
A: I want to show the one film I did, not the film you guys saw, but one I started doing at the end of Wintersession. I could reconstruct the film, and add different soundtracks. I can use the sound as a structural grid that comes in and out of focus. The commuter rail is double exposed at night, with the lights, driving. Two different things going on at the same time.
(show commuter rail film)
A: (speaking about film) There are moments in there that have the ambiguity. I like those kind of interactions. The other one has its own pacing. Due to the two things coming together, it blends the two more. I have not re-ordered the sequence. It is a very different take on the commuter rail than the other film, because of the double-exposed lights layered on top of it.
E: The ways it’s shot, the way it’s layered, they are almost frozen. There is a real depth in them. Maybe a visual relationship, it all seems related. It reminds me of the way you set up the cyanotypes in the exhibition, it was a narrative, or at least had different points of view of the same thing. And, also, landscape and space, and surroundings. You are using a traditional technique, film and cyanotype, instead of digital.
A: Yeah, it is not a forced layering. I am not juxtaposing those two things on the computer. They are blending in the medium.
K: These have more intentionality than your holga photos, you know. It’s another step. You set up a loose structure, and the things don’t end up exactly as you wish
H: There is a commonality of all of your studies. Compressing time and space into one surface. There is a certain strategy. The boundaries between the images are loose. You have no idea here it starts. It is ambiguous about the logic of the image. Also, in your movie, the beginning was fascinating. A movie is a moving image, but within that the image was moving. If you look at 35mm, 24 frames per second, these still images, in action, are what gives the illusion of movement. When I am thinking about that, “she is not doing this by accident.”
This is happening, happening, and happening. What is your intension?
When you go to the grassy lawn, when people cut through, that is the real path. We don’t go around the green. We try to find the shortest path.
I do not worry about the label, as much as the actuality. The actuality is the work. The photos that you take, those are the action, those are real. They are not concepts. My question to you is that: “Are they your thesis?”
Perhaps, I can give you some of my understanding of your work. There are certain issues that should be addressed. Not in terms of creation, because you are doing that, but in terms of presentation.
Construction and reconstruction, construction of the image of time, construction of space. Also, as a person who is trying to push you to two strategies.
One of them is: “Agnes, these are the projects that are not finished.” But also, when you put them in context, the context clarifies each of them. Like a book, if you read one chapter it is only part of the whole. So, I am asking the questions, I would rather you think about them. I don’t know what intention your thesis has, but I am sitting and watching. I see more, time and space and construction and reconstruction. Where you say “time” motion comes from the time, from the change, something is one way, and the next one changes.
Even when you have a very controlled setting, controlled to put two images together, it is a change. The image is a frozen moment, but if you juxtapose another image on another side of that screen, then it is about the image and what is in the image.
Take a look at writing about Vermeer. You know the period, 1620s dutch painter. His works were about the space using the painting, not about the painting. In certain paintings, 1620 was a time that everything in European painting would take place in the center of the paining, and the center in his paintings is empty. Very interesting. The image would talk about a broader picture, as a map to the world.
I don’t know how you want to frame them. Either you make a beginning and an end with these projects, or they take the form as they are. I would like to see the train things moving, even a little bit of structure with the sound. I would like to see the large images, I want to see those in large scale. Its like a western movie that you watch in a small screen, and the horse is this big, and it take away all the joy of a good western/film noir. So, I think because of the nature of this space and this time, scale is also part of the image.
K: These remind me of the high renaissance painting, where the perspective was very important the vanishing point
H:
Those are the things that are very common in your work, it is happening, happening.. It is the green, that is the path. You have to cut through the grass.
A:
I’m trying to make sense of all the similarities. I’m looking at other people for inspiration. I was looking at Rudy Vanderlan’s work. It intrigued me to look at the matrix of photos. You do experience things by having multiples, by walking around an object, and by walking through a space. You experience space not through the frozen moment but the multiple moments. How people thought about grids, the common vernacular, helped me understand the multiples.
H:
Your work is more interesting than Rudy’s work. His images make sense as a linear narrative next to each other. There is a sense of continuity, objects we see them once, and gradually we see them again and they change. They are like a movie. Yours are more daring. You mix them more. More study. You have the potential to be more poetic.
By that I don’t mean confusion or disorientation. What I mean, when I look at the images, I think of space, scale, and discover things. It takes me to anther stage of thinking—of achievement—which has the potential to become abstract. It is a piece of poetry, each word is a metaphor. Through a picture, it goes through our head. It gives us not just one word, but the combination of them creates an image and an emotion. His work is pseudo-scientific, and don’t mean by that to be rude. Maybe, documentary. When somebody combines them, the chance of failure is very limited. Not in all of your films—but in some of your big images—you have taken the chance and it works. I can only speak for one person. There is a value in the poetic.
Have you seen anyone similar to your own work? Creation as reconstruction? They are not collages, they are sometimes montages. For example, Descending Beauty by Duchamp. It is a frozen image of a woman descending from a staircase. In that sense, Picasso had a good notion. Also, I think the British painter, who does a lot of overlapping photographs, Hockney, is very good story. His paintings/drawings are notes about his lovers. He sits and draws them. It is a bit like Picasso, who never paid a penny for his professional models. They were all his mistresses. He had to be emotionally and physically involved. Cezanne’s model’s were professional—there was always a distance between them.
These are little notions I am trying to bring to your attention. So, if you want to work as an architecture student, architecture projects are never finished. There is no time to finish them. I went through that. That has to be part of your strategy. Graphic design projects: there is always pressure to finish. What is it? What do you want to do with it? What is the beginning, the middle, or the end? You have your strategy. It could be just unfinished, by intention, by design.
E: With these you were intending a book form?
A: A grid structure: the four part page. A very distinct grid. I am breaking it. My older ones are more contained in the space.
H: Duality. You can start making the book as an object. It is not finished, depending on how you flip the pages. It is
a representation of the building without showing the building, no beginning no end, that is a good way that I will work with the thesis document. I am interested in the experience of the book. The book as experience. The experience of traversing a space: you can join it any point.
H: That is the nature of the work you are doing. We always go with our pre-fabricated notions. Always people want to finish it. Those things have to be figured out. The spreads were separated from each other.
In design they want function. There is a code system. Things are apart but they come together. It is not a typical book, not all pages are the same size.
It deals with movement and change. By the time it is finished, it is 360 degrees. At the end of it, it goes back to the beginning. If you have the object, we don’t need to create a poster and type on it, but the experience.
A: I am more interested seeing someone’s reaction in seeing the same thing. When I recorded my film class talking about the film, these different people from different disciplines all had a different perspective on what they saw into it. There was no right answer, it was open to interpretation. Some people see the place and zone out, and others see different things into it.
This is what I feel all this work is doing. I am creating something for people to see, but they have their own interpretation of it because it is ambiguous enough. I did not want to put a word on it and define it/limit it. Matt challenged me to use ambiguous words that will create that tension—that relationship—that people can see into it, and yet have something to grasp onto to be able to see into it. I am after ambiguity, intention, and undefined nature.
H: You can define something else. Can go with the notion. You can talk, write, sketch. What does time mean in a frozen image? Or a space. What does a space mean? When you were talking about a perspective, what was the uniqueness of the Renaissance? 15th century discovery: some say that modernism started then. For architecture, it was to bring human scale to the buildings. The relationship of human beings to the objects. For painting, it was what you said: a system of vanishing points. Maybe in your work, you should not talk about the work itself, but go with abstract descriptions. It would be interesting to say “transformation of real space into the representation of what it means” or “representation of movement” or “representation of time and space.”
Those are your routes, the theoretical notions behind your work. If you bring those notions in your movie, your movie is moving and within the movement you have a different movement. I was aware of the format and what the format was presenting.
You need investigation. Why am I fascinated with the space? Why am I fascinated with scale? You are still an architect who is using the graphic design tools. There is a commonality between the two disciplines, and there is a suppression of the architects.
