Frame (Follows) Focus

Studio wall after first batch of work proofs

Reducing, rearranging, re-printing

Just sitting in a chair, staring at a wall, looking, thinking.  Damn, that’s not so bad.  I’m in residency mode – too bad it’s already been a week, and I’ve only got another left.  Perfectly fine though, it’s been a solid week of a ridiculous array of stuff.  For instance, I just now got up off the floor, where I was lying on my stomach pouring out a glass of water over a piece of crimson fabric, watching it almost immediately soak back in and evaporate on the wood paneled floor.  What led me to do that?  Who the hell knows.  I was screwing around with this fabric, and some thread and scotch tape – not really getting anywhere, looking at it and moving around, re-framing, both my body and my camera.  At first I created peaks that seemed miraculously able to hold their form toward the sky with no support – unless I focused on the silver threads or thick chunks of tape.  But, I wanted something else that would add to the material(s), something else to visually fixate upon in relation to that material in both a visual and imagined (or imaged) space.  So I got up to get a glass of water, so I could add small drops.  Then, I liked the small glass as well.  So I decided to include it in the scenario – plunked it down and tipped it over.  It was really quite perfect, the way one of the gaps in the wood flooring functioned as a dam of sorts, keeping the water from reaching the camera body.  Didn’t much matter anyway, as it soaked right back into the floor in a matter of moments (ah, that tricky term again – you see though, I mention a matter of moments – decidedly distinct from a moment. Perhaps….) 

So a quick note on the frame follows focus bit – that’s kind of what I was up to, or what was happening as I sat in the chair here (same one I’m in now, a slight pivot to the right and my sight line shifts from the studio wall covered in prints – and the glass and fabric on the floor – to a desk and paned window with sticklike trees spattered across).  Each shift of my body prompts my vision to respond by focusing on a new point, no matter how close or far together, and it’s quick this shift, we don’t generally notice.  But with each shift in focus, a new frame follows.  A frame of reference, a frame of pattern, of space, of self as well.  And I found this happening quite a lot today, all week really.  I’ve been especially aware of each new set of images that result from this kind of focal variance, and subsequent framing.  What’s interesting is that (and I may be very wrong about this, but) it seems as though the focus is instantaneous whereas the framing is just a bit more purposeful or conscious, or at least more conscious.  This leads me back to thinking around notions of what Bergson calls pure perception (that which is of an immanent sort, containing immediacy) and apperception, which relies on the comingling of things coming together/experiential understanding and knowledge that we have stored. 

I’ll get into this a tad more in relation to the admittedly disparate work I’m creating these days.  I know it all stems from a common set of concerns, and a general response to the world, but I need to sort out for myself how to either work on several things simultaneously, or determine where they come together (and if even this is necessary).

Not so easy to get on-line up in these parts.  Couple more posts will follow, likely.  Then, back to my once per week Sunday style.