Runways, Skies, Horizons

The runway itself is almost complete – you can drive across the whole expanse and hardly feel the incline.  During my artist talk at Studio Henning Haupt (thanks again to Henning for offering his space), Aviation Department Deputy Directory, Doug Webster, spoke about the inevitable transition of the site and the form it will ultimately take as an ordinary, everyday space.  A highly orchestrated series of transformative cuts, marks, pushes and pulls will turn what is now perceived as an ordered yet chaotic site into a precisely constructed and fully integrated plot of land – it will soon become entirely familiar.

I was thinking about some of this as I gathered new material on the site and its periphery during my visit this May. As well, I traveled a bit further down into the Everglades National Park to think a bit more about the delicate ecosystem the airport is a part of.  I found myself looking to the sky, and the horizon – linking the birds in flight and the long, empty space of sky and water to the expanse of the long, interrupted surface of the runway, and the sameness of the blue above, in both spaces.

Party on Top of the Hill - After School

One of the more enjoyable experiences of this visit was the opportunity to spend time with a group of kids from a local after school program (and surprisingly so, to be quite truthful – I’m not a HUGE kid person, but this group was amazing).  We drove up to the tippy top of the construction site to get a view and see the progress on the runway, and stopped in one of the terminals to see an in-progress terrazzo floor piece.  I got a chance to talk with them about my participation as artist-in-residence and they were so enthusiastic I wound up giving prints to anyone who wanted them – which was everyone, and they had a hard time making choices, and I couldn’t say no, so, like I said earlier, most of my work proofs printed during the community studio hours went right back into the community.  It seemed entirely appropriate.

A few images from the school tour are below.

Community Studio in the Airport, Once More

There was a bit less hustle and bustle in the airport during the community studio hours in May, as the holiday travelers weren’t descending upon the region en masse as in December, and I didn’t have the school kid orchestras as my neighbors busting out the Christmas jams. But, the semi-quiet was good too.  This time I got to know the airport employees a bit better – some of the baggage claim staff for various airlines, the cruise line gang, one of the Sheriff’s deputies that patrol the airport, and Artie, the Airport Ambassador, in particular.  He let me share the space around the information booth with him, and we shared tons of stories - about his years as a pilot for Delta, growing up in New York, old photographs, family and travel.  I gained a lot of perspective from Artie, as well as a new appreciation for the day-to-day minutiae of the airport itself.

I had so much fun talking with people this time, that I didn’t spend as much time working on still-life set ups during these hours, but instead focused primarily on printing work proofs (which I promptly gave away over half of during the after-school program visit that also took place that week – more on that in the next blog post).  A did make a few wee little foothills though – a composite image is below....

Birds, Glades and Trains

I didn't have a chance to post work proofs from my past few site visits, so I thought I'd include a few composite mock-ups from recent experiments in the studio.  I'm still thinking through how individual images will work together and have begun to think a bit about the site more broadly, in terms of the particular ecological and cultural aspects of the region the airport is serving, as well as the geological and natural materials that take on a different character whether they are encountered in relation to the construction site or the general vicinity, including the parks on the periphery of the Everglades.

Below are a few images related to this thinking.

That Slice of Sky

I was curious what would happen on this visit as it was the first time I visited the site while consciously thinking of depicting the space in a manner that might simultaneously work as a horizontal or vertical image (either moving or still).  Not surprisingly, I was preoccupied by the way making (relatively) tiny slices out of the piled up dirt would allow the air above (or beside) to dominate the image.  And, similarly, by choosing to make little slivers out of the atmosphere, the space would flatten out drastically.  These simple shifts in perspective are so basic, but it’s interesting to consider that this is likely the dominant view for so many of the workers that occupy these shifting spaces daily. 

Click Image for Larger View

So, that’s part of what I was thinking about while wandering around a bit.  As well, I was drawn to some of the newly produced still lifes resulting from the construction residue – a few of those are below.

  

Tilting the Horizon

Two of the proposed pieces for eventual installation in the airport take the form of digital kiosks, the kind normally used for commercial advertisements.  It’s been tricky to think about what sort of imagery I’ll use for those works due to their unconventional nature both in terms of how the work will be encountered as well as its format – that of a slim, vertical rectangle.  Yesterday, while out on a run through the hills, I started thinking about the earth’s horizon and the symmetry it helps produce when perceived in the form of the traditional, rectangular landscape we are accustomed to – running straight through the picture plane or perceptual field, left to right.  Yet this same type of balance can also be present in the form of an angular line (the tilt of hill against the sky, for instance) or even as a vertical slice, running up and down (gazing out toward the landscape while lying on your side, for instance). 

This line of thought really helped me conceptualize how I might interlace still and moving images together to run on a continuous loop on the monitors within the kiosks.  Initially, I planned to crop vertical segments from horizontal compositions (my preferred framing method for still images, and the default aspect ratio for video).  But I now realize I may be able to present scenes or spaces that were purposefully recorded horizontally as vertical images, playing on the balance and symmetry mentioned above while introducing elements of abstraction as well.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts my work in the field/studio.  For now, I’m going through the archived images to see whether any are particularly suited to this.  A few possibilities are below.

From the Field

This visit, I was especially interested in the seasonal changes and shifts in quality of light – and how that impacted the seeming sameness of the site.  There is something intriguing about the lack of seasons in south Florida.  Amidst the warm, muggy air still remaining in December, the space had a very different visual feel than it did under the same humid air in August, which was different still in May.  The heaviness of the intense blue sky seems to have a more desolate or flat quality in the fall/winter than in the spring/summer when that same blue feels much sharper.  The earth, fauna and machinery surrounding the site all take on a very different appearance depending upon these aspects as well as time of day and weather, of course.  Aware of this, I found myself paying attention to spaces that seemed most affected by these subtleties.  A few first edits are below.  (Click images for detail view).