Introduction to
“Watcher: Strategies of Art, Observation, and
Adaptation” installation at Yaddo 2010
“Watcher” is an installation that I completed
at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. It investigated the
complexity of contemporary experiences, interpretations and
uses of Nature.
For five years I have been documenting fugitive events on
Mount Livermore and treating the documentation as artifacts
that continuously re-contextualize and adapt to new
situations and locations. Through relational and
adaptive actions, my experiential encounters with Nature
and Culture navigate through new associations. The
installation changed during my seven weeks residency and
included several “events” in the space when I
invited writers, performance artists and playwrights to
perform. Through my artwork I investigate a visual language
of semantic networks, transitional experiences, verbs of
perception and changing morphologies. Overwhelming
complexity in nature has become the starting point into an
inquiry into the pauses, spaces and thresholds--the dark
matter, so to speak. By viewing stoppages, borders,
boundaries and margins as thresholds, a reciprocity between
the natural world and my artwork develops. I view fragments
as sections of a whole and intermittent spaces as equal
activities that can be imaginatively formalized.
It is my intention to accept complexity, reject essence and
to question all attempts to limit, fragment, or otherwise
reduce experiential knowledge.
My work
has been devoted to landscape concepts since 1989. Five
years ago I began reading military tracking manuals, David
Harvey’s writings on human political geography,
capitalism, and forced migrations of humans, and
Goethe’s writings on morphology. In order to see the
landscape in new ways, I set up an interview with a retired
U.S. Border Patrol tracker. The meeting resulted in
tracking lessons, information about human and drug
corridors in the area, and a conversation about nearby
Mount Livermore, a mountain that can be seen from my
studio. After the tracker pointed out that Mount Livermore
is a landmark for drug traffickers and undocumented workers
backpacking through the area, I adopted the mountain as the
focus of my artwork. Many historical moments, technological
stages, and political agendas converge at Mount Livermore
which is situated 50 miles from the U.S./Mexico border,
north of Marfa, Texas. While learning elementary tracking
techniques, I trained my eyes to see through the
distraction of the foreground toward what is hidden in the
less focused background. Attention to the
“absence” of clearly distinguishing separations
of foreground to background, recognition of subtle
disturbances on the ground, advantageous positioning of the
body to the object, and concentration on attempted
concealment and camouflage transformed my notions of
figure/ground relationships and Gestalt Aesthetics. The
resulting artwork explored the multivalence of the
landscape through an attentive consideration of
figure-ground relations. Such relations are far from being
fixed or static. Gestalt is a continuum of moving and
changing experiences. My artwork questions what constitutes
wholeness of form, shape, perceptual field and viewpoint.
Rather than a series of phenomenon, isolated occurrences or
fragments, I began to recognize how inadequate it is to
frame the particular against the whole. It is necessary to
interrelate phenomenon (objects) and process (events or
experiences) in order to track. Furthermore I began to
recognize that there is no reduction of experience as I
attempt to transform sensory experience outdoors into a
representation of that experience because the
re-presentation becomes a new sensory episode. The
pause between events is the threshold to continually new
possibilities. In formal terms my installations since 2004
are a continuous series of black and white compositions
reminding me to observe carefully and build attentively. I
find comfort in the shifting, moving, and changing natural
world. The kinetic generosity of wilderness is the source
for my art. My artwork is morphologically designed to
resist notions of totalities, endings or categories--any
reference that might restrict its ability to move, change
and adapt. What I have learned by hiking in wilderness
areas is a manner of living and working with senses and
options open and receptive. It requires a conscious act of
measured forgetting in order to value the present moment,
be attentive to individual events and pauses, and observant
of objects and my relationship to them.
What started as tracking lessons in order to see the
landscape differently has resulted in a series of art
installations that stage an unlikely encounter between
pre-Enlightenment Cabinets of Curiosity, Goethe’s
writings on morphology, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, and
the dazzle paint and anti-rangefinding camouflage schemes
of World Wars I and II.