PROJECT DETAILS WRITTEN BELOW.

This project focuses on experiencing a new perspective through visualizing the landscape in a spiritual installation.  A more in depth environmental relationship working with layers of sound and light through a photographic medium within a designed architectural construct to focus more intently on attention, sensation and perception.  The mechanics of sound composition, spatial relationships and materials used for the architecture impact each sense.

THE ARCHITECTURE:

Beginning with our architectural environment, our sense of space impacts our physical and mental well-being. We “feel ourselves into” (to use Robert Vischer’s term) our living environments in a multisensory and immediate way through our bodies, and these feelings have biological consequences.  The design of the space within the built environment has been important for centuries taking into consideration the use of sacred geometry and acoustics.  This has been developed as a round space to take into account the importance of the circle in geometric theory, the nature of caves and other temples through the ages, as well as the enveloping acoustics within a round space.  The shape works to prevent noise from the interior or exterior settings from dissipating or creating any extraneous factors from within the temple like setting. 

THE IMAGE:

This piece uses light sensitive photo paper to capture a landscape rather than using a shutter within digital, or film, photography.  The photo paper when exposed to the natural environment, and light, is absorbing numerous different wavelengths of light and atmospheric conditions in the emulsion and silver halide crystals that make up the top layers of the paper for processing.  The image ends up black upon development and allows the viewer to visualize the sense of the surrounding void as part of their spatial relationship.  I view it as a more actual capture of the landscape at the moment of exposure. The black monochrome photograph creates a void in the visual dimension.  The captured light within the layers of the exposed paper creates a more layered image of the landscape than that of the shutter.  This allows the viewer to continually activate the image through the sense of sound, contemplation and personal experience triggered by intuition and aspects of memory without a visual representation to sway the imagination of the viewer.  It purposefully excludes the familiar, focusing instead on the energy within what first appears as nothingness.  

THE SOUND:

Sound is part of the root of being.  Our ears are unable to turn off or disengage the surrounding elements.  Always present, sound influences our subjectivity whether we intend or recognize it.  The sound that fills the space is an audio recording from the duration of time of the photographic exposure that I have manipulated and play back.