How would you describe the process of creating your works at Artpace?
I’m interested in philosophies of seeing and the frameworks for how we understand image and object relationships. While at Artpace, I’ve been thinking about relationships between material and time. The works in the show play off one another; for instance the glass works I think of as a kind of live camera/live photograph while the prints reveal stages of unfixed photographic paper. There’s something about the photograph as both a thing to see and a thing to see with that really interests me. I used a large format camera to produce the images, so the experience of looking, of working with a very deliberate apparatus, is extended to the works in the show…the physicality of the camera informs an acute sense of positioning.
How did the traditional action of “viewing” differ when creating these works?
I’ve been researching the histories of spectacle and more specifically, early uses of viewing chambers and displays in world’s fair exhibitions. San Antonio was the site of the 1968 World’s Fair, also known as the HemisFair, and featured the Tower of the Americas. I’m interested in past, utopian aspirations that place emphasis on a desired vantage or viewpoint. How does a vantage become authoritative? To what degree can a physical framework be traced historically? For instance, the history of the panorama comes out of an evolving relation of the human to the horizon. The video work in the show was filmed from the Tower of the Americas. The slow rotation of that structure made me think about photographic mechanisms like the steadicam and how inscribed systems of viewing are in certain architecture.
Glass is a key material used in the show. What was your interest in its familiarity to the camera?
I am exploring the relationship between the surface of the photograph and the image it represents. Similarly, glass is a material subject to be looked through and also looked at simultaneously. Because glass is part of the makeup of a camera, it is tethered to the history of photography and seeing. With the works in the exhibition, I was thinking about ways of extending the experience of seeing beyond the fixed image, into a physical space, where glass becomes both a reference to the camera but also something like a live photograph, both reflective and translucent. The conditions of light, time, and viewer position mark subtle shifts in color and space.
