For the exhibition, The Infra-structural Image: Urban Projections from the Bay Area and Vancouver
JS] Some questions regarding fields.
The downward cascading wipe appears to catch and divide the video grab into smaller intervals yet appears not to do this in chronological order
The pictures are building in chronological order. As I was walking, I used the camera as an extension of my movement and I captured that movement sequentially. I often pointed the lens up, down, left, right, sideways in rapid succession, trying to sort of photographically consume things around me in pieces. The resulting compositions were serendipitous -- a collision of how the frames built up and sequenced through this movement. I was often working in bright sunlight and could not see what I was shooting because the camera's LCD was so obliterated by the sun (I did not use a viewfinder but rather held the camera at arms distance.) When I got back to the studio and played the video, there were many surprises.
JS] Unlike other work that I have read about this material is not derived from an archive (I'm thinking of your de Young work), yet there seems to be a random cataloguing about it. Is there a logic to sequence of images?
fields was the first movie project that I shot all my own material.
I would shoot pictures everyday, of everything I saw -- inside, outside, near, far, landscape, details, textures, sky, flowers, wood grain, the aisles of Home Depot, a parked RV, buildings, doors, grates, people, crowds leaving a stadium, clouds, cracks, up, down, etc.
It was an experiment in creating my own vast repository of pictures and to see what happened. I wanted to collect all these pieces through pictorial fragments and be able to have that expand and contract, to re-order them in different ways. I guess it is sort of like making your own fabric that you can do what you wish with it, make a dress or a ball or something else, but you still have the fabric underlying whatever it is.
At first, I thought it would be best to storyboard the whole project and compose the order of scenes or pictures. In other works, such as The Collection (descending) there was a process of ordering, in that case, the piece moves specifically through time, 21st century down, by genre, collection and artist, and patterns emerge from that process.
After looking at the fields material, I realized that it had it already had it's own form and rhythm and it could simply play. I ended up using the footage fairly true to as it was shot. I was interested in having all these pictures, or fragments, remain as non-hierarchical as they could. They were simply chunks of the world being captured and put back together as these sort of building blocks. Because the video frame is uniformly interrupted into 16 elements that build and break down with a very particular pattern, it feels like a catalog. I wanted the landscape familiar to me to be re-presented as vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, green fragments, red fragments and textures, rather than seeing a "real" picture of lines painted in the street, a fence or people sitting on a green lawn. In the work, that pattern of texture is occasionally interrupted by this sort of odd fissure of a full frame video that appears for a second or two -- that is when you see the "real" scene before it is broken down into 16 discreet images. It happened when the still camera couldn’t shoot fast enough since I was continually pressing the shutter, and for just that moment, it is a glimpse of the scene. This was unforeseen in the way I shot it and I ended up using those moments in the piece.
JS] According to the press release there is the photograph "index" that originally went with the projection? Do you have a copy of this?
What size is it? Is this necessary to show in conjunction with the projection?
It is not necessary to show index with the projection.
I have made 3 photographs which function as indices to the fields movies. index, 2001 was the first. Everyday Sequentially and Days (by color), both 2002, contained all the fields pictures shot to date one year later. There were also other small photos that were color fragments, subsets of the index -- all the green pictures from fields titled green, all the yellow titled yellow, etc.
In 2002, I made a 2nd version, 90 minutes long, titled Fields (Feature). I was interested in making a feature length for showing in LA.
JS] Were the sites chosen for these video grabs of particular significance?
I did not want anything to be significant. I was much more interested in that all subjects and objects were the same, they all had the same weight and value.
JS] Are these sequence images generated through walking or driving?
walking.
JS] What does the title fields refer to?
I was thinking about fields of color, fields of information, color field painting. The work functioned as a painting for me, a diptych where one projection would be primarily red and the other vivid yellow stripes, for example. The two projections are not synchronized and because a person simply takes 20 seconds longer to start the one DVD player than the other, the images will form new relationships and new juxtapositions, new fields of color, than perhaps the day before.
JS] I noticed that your work had taken the city as a referent in a suite of photographs that you made -- Untitled (Mailbox), 2003; Untitled (Truck), 2003; and (Large Polaroid), 2004. Are these part of a larger series of photographs on the city. What lead you to chose these locations?
These photos are referred to as "photo-drawings". You appear to be cutting up the image and blanking out shapes and object. As with your other work is this done in a randomized way?
While I was shooting fields, I discovered there were many times that portions of the pictures became so overexposed that there was nothing there or just a faint image of one item within a landscape remained. I became very interested in this awkward sort of negative space. This led me to the photo-drawings.
With the photo-drawings, I began taking single images and taking chunks away, whereas fields was about building up through a series of chunks. It was a subtractive process versus additive and it is fairly random. I was very interested in the iconic works of photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, as well as the painter Robert Bechtle. Untitled, (truck), 2003, is a vintage Ford truck parked in front of a mid-century house. The picture could have been taken 30 years ago, the subject of Bechtle in the 70's, but there it is in 2004. Large Polaroid is more about sculptural space on a flat plane and stacking that space, similar to Fields, 3-D.
I think I was drawn to sort of nostalgic sites, by that I mean, locations that had been sited many times in the history of photography -- a certain kind of house with a pitched roof line, a car parked in front of a house, things like that. I wanted to make a picture that had these references but would also refer to how the reading and taking and distribution of pictures is entirely different. The way that pictures are composited, literally or metaphorically, how they can be pulled apart, used and reused in different ways. For me the deletions do this.
JS] In what way might these photo-drawings relate to your video projection fields? Or are they more of a complete departure in terms of technique?
The process is different, however both works are about these kind of chunks that can be reconfigured and relocated, shifted around. The photo-drawings use white space to define what could be either a negative or a positive space. The white space functions as a possibility. It may be occupied with something we can't see which is perhaps more dense than part of a building.
Fields 3-D, 2004 is an example of a work directly related to the fields video projection. Essentially, it is a few hundred pictures from the video printed as 4x6 snapshots, mounted to foam core and stacked on a plexiglas structure so the density of the work is no longer flat, or linear, as in the videos or the index photos.
Sprinkled amid the stacks of Fields 3-D are drawings of some of the photos with areas whited-out and deleted, (like the photo-drawings), as well as collaged with other materials. So it is all mixed up. They all have a relationship to one another.
