Eagle
First exhibited in ‘Yolande Harris: Listening to the Distance’, Woodbury Art Museum, Utah Valley University Orem 2015
Floor to ceiling video wall projection, two-channel sound, (See Eyrie : 5 color still images)
I am a hermit. I inhabit an eyrie. I look down on the resting eagles. I fly with them. There is no sense of time in this journey. Just the gliding of wings through air and the motion of water. Can you look through my layered lenses, open your ears and hear the air moving? Can you listen to the distance with me?
‘Eagle’ (2015) uses video, sound and images to explore a journey to spaces of mind that lie beyond everyday reality. The eagle is the guide to this other space, and the artist peers into the distance through layered lenses, allowing light seepage and time shifts, to record this journey through a crack in consciousness. The video and images search through the psyche to the intuitive landscapes perhaps inhabited by other beings (birds, whales) and archetypes (water, mountains). The images explore a blur and disruption of clear vision, the confines of a frame and motion, of trying to focus but being unable to, of scanning the land and sea. The close-up image and sense of searching is contrasted with the expansive space of long distance sounds. Listening to the electronic and acoustic sounds of a robotic sea-glider as it tracks through the ocean recording its environment, one enters the zone of drone sounds, occasionally hearing the calls of whales. Combining the technological glitches of the robot’s sounds with the layered looking through lenses and projections, the work searches for a portal that allows us to extend our senses beyond the functional reality of technologies. The still images complement the experience of the large-scale videos by isolating individual frames in order to create a quality of timelessness and non-linearity. The complex drone-like environmental sounds focus the mind and create a space of intimacy from which to explore the individual frames and the visual possibility of time and journeying in stillness.
‘Eagle’ was commissioned by Woodbury Art Museum for its Permanent Collection.
With thanks to Kate Stafford, University of Washington, for the first audio recording from the sea glider.
