Horizon lines: stabilizing / destabilizing
The series looks at the way the horizon line within a work of art physically orients and grounds the beholder, or how the absence of a horizon destabilizes them. Working back and forth between materials and techniques in sculpture, drawing, and photography offers different aspects to appear individually and one to the next. Within each material or process there is a full line of inquiry unto itself. In a collaboration the “product” is not the work of any one of the individuals involved but is the surprising consequences of several individuals working together collectively. While each of these formats has individually allowed me to come to understand more fully the nature of the horizon line it is the “conversation” and influence each process has one on the other that has brought breadth to the work. Much like the world at large composed of an infinity of disparate elements that comes together to form a whole.
The small delicate porcelain forms along the shelves align themselves with it like edifices against a horizon; moreover, like the latter, we read their shapes without quite making out what they are. They are both things and projections. Deliberate choices about their display underscore this difference. The edges reflect back lines of light as though a drawing in space while the paper-thin walls are translucent in some places and worn completely through in others lending a sense of fragility and grace. The warmth of the wood shelf reflects in the white of the porcelain while the white of the porcelain bounces onto the wall and shelf creating a shimmering atmospheric quality reminiscent of the way the air looks over the water on a hot summer day. Reflections and transmitted light, glowing edges and silhouetted forms help them teeter between their being as objects and their being as phenomena of shadow and light.
The landscape is hard to stop—it just keeps going. The camera allows me to stop it by taking a horizontal core sample. I want an image that indexes the world but is not identifiable as a particular place. Views of the skyline from the tops of tall buildings while offering breathtaking vistas, are also disquieting and destabilizing. I am interested in the ways in which a vast view of the horizon line, is at times grounding and at others so expansive as to subvert the assertive presence of the horizon. I am working to create a similar sense of instability in the beholder; one where the floor on which they are standing becomes uncertain. The photographs give the horizontal stability of the horizon, mirrored and repeated in the cloud above, while withdrawing itself as well as the offer of groundedness into a quasi-sculptural frame that replaces the horizon's gravity with its own.