The Mountain Itself

It’s an uncanny experience – to navigate throughout mountainous terrain, even in the most basic of manners (in my case, with the ease of a car – stopping to wander for short bits). Reviewing photographs and video made on-site a couple of days after the “fact” – adds a layer of remove, furthering the incongruities between experience and representation. Why does a mountain appear as a mountain?  How does it transform when you are upon it, or beside it – either in its space or with its image?

A good friend (a partner in crime of sorts in terms of this kind of thinking) serendipitously sent along a Merleau-Ponty passage in an email the other day, just as I happened to be out on my excursion along the Icefields Parkway. Thank you, Leigh-Ann…

"It is the mountain itself which from out there makes itself seen by the painter; it is the mountain that he interrogates with his gaze.  What exactly does he ask of it? To unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself mountain before our eyes. Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, all these objects of his quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence. In fact they exist only at the threshold of profane vision; they are not ordinarily seen. The painter's gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing, what they do to compose this talisman of a world, to make us see the visible."

MMP Eye and Mind, pp. 128

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Of Reminiscent Repulsion

I’m a couple of days late posting – been in and out of the studio, making photographs and capturing video around Banff and along the Icefields Parkway yesterday (a post on that to follow). But, it’s all about the random associations with this batch. 

Things/scenes/objects/material(s) – reminiscent to/from one another, and beside, or aside to/from one another – separate and distinct, yet common.

The phrase “on thin ice” keeps popping up – obviously because I was very near to some, physically, but I also feel as though I’m treading dangerously close to some pretty ridiculous territory with some of these images.

How far is too far? How dumb is too dumb? We’re talking brillo pads and trash bags, people. 

Ah, what the hell.

On that note, a brief passage from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness,

The touch of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words.  Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association…even the wind’s burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity...

There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.

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An Emergent Representation

So, this is the part that precedes the passage about the “photo as an emergent, novel representation” that I quoted from Laruelle in the post I made before I made my way to Banff:

The ‘categorical’ content of photography, the a priori photographic content, serves in a certain way as an hypothesis (that must not be imagined, in empiricist manner, to be a simple fiction or supposition) of the experimental work carried out by the photographer who tries to adjust the techno-perceptual complex, with its image content, to that a priori but still undetermined imaging dimension.

- François Laruelle  

I’m tempted to just leave it at that for now, as it pretty much sums up how I’ve been approaching things while here in residence, thus far.  I’ve let myself run pretty wild in terms of what kinds of spaces and materials I’m paying attention to, and how – both visually and conceptually, I suppose.  Still, a common thread runs through (at least for me) – that of the land and/or components somehow reminiscent of earth and atmosphere.

I suspected I would come across new things to look at here, and after a trip to the hardware store I wound up with some decidedly random stuff, including different types of screen and a bit of cheesecloth.  Of course the moiré patterns became immediately evident – more on that later, I think.  I have to say though, I can’t help but wonder if I was subconsciously influenced by the cover image of The Concept ofNon-Photography sitting on my desk, a detail from Moiré 3, by Liz Deschenes.

Any rate, like I said, more on that later.  For now, a single video clip as well as a few first (lightly edited, and non-composited) images are below.

These words and scattered images are dedicated to Lisa Zaher, in honor of her father.

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