Tag: thesis

Surface Modulation

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Deer Field, 4:54, single channel video, 2010, Jamie Hahn, https://vimeo.com/25209325

Surface Modulation: Chapter Three of Figure Ground Rhythm Thesis by Jamie Hahn 2010

Spring grass has a kind of gentle sway about it as wind caresses the thin, tapering blades. Peaking through the damaged brown, dry grass of winter, the new blades shine and glisten in fresh color. Not yet cut, the new blades reach high toward the light of the sun and create a bed of density from which all other growth compares.

The view from here is of a detailed foreground that blends at eye level into a middle ground of land. Framing from above is a telephone line, which serves as a reminder of the distance between myself and the background of willow trees layered in front of a low hill. The sun is permeating through the new leaves, illuminating their tonality as they contrast the branches from which they stem. The from here is of warmth. The sun casts light through the blades, the leaves, and the trees with new buds.

Surface a gust of movement, a contrasting moment of perception alters the visual to reveal the tangible as my apparent stillness recalls a passive engagement within this constancy. I am transfixed by the complexity of nature in this landscape as each moment eases into the next. The sun begins to set and a light breeze brings about a cooler interpretation of discernment amongst all things herein. Every blade, every branch, every plant sways in reaction to the atmosphere. My figure to ground rhythm is in constant flux as time reveals difference.

Surface color, texture, form. Surface a screen, a frame, an expression.

Wispy clouds of fog dance across the mountain, reminding me of my rhythmic interchange between self and air, skin and spatiality. I draw inspiration from looking out the window. Though simple in action, the result urges a desire to meditate with nature as though to bond myself further within a living space of moment to moment perception; moments that deepen a desire to integrate my soul with the changeability that the landscape provides. A constancy of interplay, movement directs a meaning within my memory and my identity of self within place, a location, a history. I reflect, I engage, I learn, I embrace. Anew is my attention to each moment as visual and tangible perception reveals a difference within a space of internal simplicity.

Surface an exterior repetition. Surface a rhythm of similarity.

Difference within similarity of an atmospheric landscape can surface within a moving image. Similar to the representations discussed thus far, artists using video, film, frame and screen extended their perceptual view of the landscape by positioning the resulting projection as an example of moment to moment difference. Defined as experimental or avante garde film makers, these interpreters of motion within nature were as transfixed by atmospheric alterations of form and the resulting affect on mood as the Tonalists. Engaging the viewer with subtlety, Larry Gottheim and Peter Hutton each employed the camera to record single, continuous shots of subtle difference within a frame of an otherwise steady landscape. By embracing the temporal structure of the medium, they were able to identify a similarity of form as it related to movement and shifting suggestions within nature. Considerations of spatiality and viewer entry into the frame developed as a formal element. The two dimensional design of the fixed frame structure (projection screen) was key in the process of contextualizing an overall concept.

One of the most influential writers on experimental film, Scott McDonald, draws comparisons between Gottheim, Hutton and the history of American landscape artists, in his book “The Garden in the Machine“. Acknowledging the use of time in moment to moment perception as illustrated in the moving format, McDonald explores the representation of nature and landscape in what he expresses as “minimalist tactics” of these two particular avante garde filmmakers. Gottheim’s work of the early 1970’s contrasted heavily against the prevailing contemporary mindset of visual perception in time within a film or cinematic frame. He pushed the boundary of expectation often driving his viewers into irritation or annoyance at how “boring or slow” the piece seemed to be. Almost photographic in its apparent stillness, the imagery was even more bold through its silence.

“Viewers have been trained to feel that landscape is not a legitimate subject for even a ten-minute film experience. This provides us with a measurement of how different our sensibilities are from those of the previous century. When I ask viewers after a screening of Gottheim’s Fog Line what they’ve just seen, frequent response is “Nothing!”. Without overt plot and movement, viewers are just virtually blind to subtlety.”

Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line, 1970, introduces simple complexity as the opening frame displays a dense, green rectangle. Nearly an abstraction, the piece evolves slowly, “What one sees and can identify depends on the relative thickness of the fog, which gradually clears but does not disappear”. What one sees also depends on how attentive a viewer is of the subtle motion. Gottheim presents a fixed viewpoint. The only changes occurring are the atmospheric elements shifting or lifting as they reveal forms hidden within. Trees become identifiable as do three “high-tension wires”. Within this framing device, Gottheim allows the lifting of the fog to make visible suggestive moments happening in this set duration of time. The wires offer linear sections that break the composition into thirds, each section offering a change to the viewer who hasn’t “spaced out” to the green, murky introduction. McDonald writes, “The wires are central to Gottheim’s thinking about the scene he depicts. Their compositional effect is to raise our consciousness of the upper and lower horizontal lines of the film frame and of the frame’s rigid rectangularity. While we usually tend to use the film frame as a window into the conventional illusion of three dimensional space, the lines mitigate against our penetration of the space, and draw attention to the surface. The dispersal of fog is gradual that one cannot be sure when changes are actually occurring in the image and when they are occurring in the mind.”

Bringing attention to the capabilities of the medium and of the visual perceptual system, Gottheim intentionally presents a perspective as interpreted by first, his selection, and second, the camera’s transformation of it. The grainy surface of the film is illuminated by the projection and the surface of the material becomes an integral element of the composition’s formal elements. By creating a kind of perspectival spatiality, he reveals layers of shifting consciousness between the screen, the image and an illusion of meaning therein. Transient visual perception meets meditative focus in this atmospheric landscape. What was once a vague entry of abstracted tonalities and subtle forms, the view becomes an active visual experience tuned to individual discernment as suggestive moments linger on the edge of believability.

Here we find the frame of surface between materiality, illusion, projection and image. In Peter Hutton’s films, as in Fog Line, movement within a landscape is subtle and gradual. This modulation allows a very dramatic and intense representation of what moment-to-moment perception actually looks like and perhaps more importantly, what it feels like. Hutton is especially interested in tuning into the viewers mind through their senses. Through “spatial and temporal compositions” he allows “a revelation of the motion of the world to speak directly to the viewers mind”. Directing his work to this state, something of a meditative state akin to the Tonalists, he positions or re-positions the subject of the film to be a subject of the viewer’s own sense of introspection. Infused with qualities of light and atmosphere, his fundamental gesture directs the following in Landscape for Manon, 1987, as McDonald writes,

“An unusual perceptual process develops in these landscapes. In nearly every instance, the landscape seems first like a still photograph. It is only if and when one accepts this apparent stillness that a subtler form of motion begins to tease the eye and mind, and we realize that what looked to be still is actually a part of a much larger order of motion: the cloud masses are gradually, relentlessly shifting through the space defined by the frame; the subtleties of the composition are continually evolving to reveal an order much greater than the rectangular world represented by the camera.”

By extending perception from a visual systematic response to an internal reflection of introspection and self awareness, both Hutton and Gottheim embrace a sense of “the transformative”. Each illuminate the screen with moving atmospheres in a frame of landscape. In likeness to the Tonalists, their illusive depictions direct an internal destination.

Within this transient dialog between screen, illusion and introspection, it becomes evident that movement or modulation, occurs cyclically. In his book Movement as Meaning, Daniel Barnett enters a discourse in how movement is meaningful in avante garde film and other moving imagery. He suggests that as a surface modulates it shifts perception from a maker’s perspective, to what the camera frames and represents, to the projection frame and the illusory surface of the screen, and then, to the internal psychological frame of reflection. In consideration of the composition, Barnett states, “Pictorial movement within the overall design offers rhythms to shift our attention as the eye moves and revisits elements, making subsequent comparisons to represent a dialogue between ourselves and the composition. It’s as if the surface of the image becomes a semi-silvered mirror as our mind dialogues with itself, contemplating the relationships between what is seen and how it feels.”

Within this perceptual shifting, a tension arises, drawing us “from a depicted place in the world to the place we are in the moment, and then, to a contemplation of the comparison between the two.” Now we can see how the figure to ground rhythm occurs in time, between the viewer and the projected image, the moment between difference and similarity, and exterior surface to the internal reflection of contemplation.

Thesis Bibliography: Chapter Four

Barnett, Daniel. Movement as Meaning: in Experimental Film. Rodopi BV, Amsterdam-NY, 2008

McDonald, Scott. The Garden and the Machine. University of California Press, 2001.

Spielmann, Yvonne. Video the Reflexive Medium. MIT Press, 2008.Save

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Atmospheric Perception

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Atmospheric Perception: Chapter Two of Figure Ground Rhythm Thesis by Jamie Hahn 2010

At this moment, at this view, looking through the blinds to the scene outside, snow is falling quickly. In an irregular rhythm the flakes dance across the trees, bounce against the window and hide the distant mountain. The pine tree shifts in and out of focus as the snow static blurs its identity.

Outside, an intense wind pushes snow flakes against my stance. Stillness is not an option in this whirlwind. Everything is moving. Individual flakes become a white flock of wild masses flying through dense, cold air landing only for a moment before being whisked away by a frenetic wind.

The view is chaotic as a visual search begins for recognizable forms to lead the way. Distant markers have been masked by the atmospheric display of white static noise. An otherwise well-known path is obscured by a white dressing, and the walk becomes a search for familiarity.

Illuminating the moment, light has an ability to direct perception through colors, shapes and atmosphere. On a journey with time, the view welcomes new tonality as each moment passes from sunrise to sunset. Atmospheric rhythms emanate from falling snowflakes, misty fog, crisp frost, hazy thunderstorms and dancing winds. From within forms of spatiality arises a depth of perception that becomes something of a meditation on shifting focus between the detailed moment and the distant horizon of passing time.

Light gracefully serves as a guide through variations of darkness depending on time of day and place within an exterior environment or an interior one. We use light to see through to find our way. In its multitudes of variance, light comes to our visual system in waves of intensity. When standing outside, our vision takes us only so far as the light allows us to see clearly identifiable shapes within a scope of distance. Existing here is a boundary in actual lightness perception.

“In judging the lightness of surface, an observer must estimate and discount the optical viewing conditions: these include illumination level, haze, and interposed filters. The physical effects can be captured in terms of additive and multiplicative factors which we call the atmosphere.”

Atmospheric light is more easily identifiable on a hot, hazy day when the horizon is slightly out of focus from the haze of humidity in the air. We can also see this diffused light when fog hangs as a mist in varying levels of density. Looking out across a mountain range also provides an example of atmospheric light as our view is vast but the distance details are less discernible. The visual system is working to see through atmospheric particles in the air as they diffuse and shift in various angles and directions from the sun.

As atmospheric perception guides the view, it works to define spatial relationships in the figure to ground environment. In a moment to moment revelation, light and tonality offer change and contrast to a relative point of view. This four-dimensional (time-based) experience is translated to a two-dimensional space in still and moving images. Aesthetically, performatively, in technological and conceptual formation, a system is in place to bridge visual perception to an internal reflection. Frame to screen, this interpretive surface leads the way to the tangibility of rhythmic, time-based relationships between observer, maker, media and the representation therein.

Light and depth have been represented in two-dimensional forms since ancient Roman frescoes first depicted illusory scenes of atmospheric perspective. By adding shades of blue to an overlapping distant background, they were able to suggest distance. Additional techniques of creating perspective were developed in the Renaissance with the mathematical formula of perspective which included diagonal, single point, atmospheric, vanishing point, foreshortening, picture space and viewpoint. By using geometry, painters could enhance the illusion of depth which further added to the believability of the compositional design; making it appear as close to a real-life dimension upon an otherwise flat surface. This picture space then, became the plane of foreground, middleground and background, “any object or figure in the extreme foreground was used to lead the eye into the picture and push back other objects, making them appear further back in the picture plane”.

Color, tone, contrast and scale were also meticulously used in the designing of the scene being depicted.  Painters such as Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer used light and tonality to contrast and enhance their dramatic depictions. Additional shifts in light as focus occurred in the Baroque and Rococo movements as artists began to search the canvas for motifs of greater emotional impact. What followed was the Romantic era of subject and object being of one in the same: feeling. Illuminating this new sensibility was the increased use of lightness with darkness. From Gericault’s Portrait of a Child Murderer  and Friedrich’s Abbey Among the Oak Trees, new directional lighting was infused into spaces of darkness. From madness to spiritual awakening, painters filled their canvases with awe, terror and what became known for what couldn’t be described any other way: the sublime.

Halfway through the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution brought about a new sense of time and perception of light and motion. The railway offered an entirely new perspective, “objects viewed while rapidly traversing the landscape appeared to melt, and nature itself to be in motion. The scenes which unfolded were rapid sequences. The landscape became about the whole rather than the details within”. Out of the industrial revolution arose a greater sense of identity in relationship to place and time.

Relating to the moment, a select group of artists encourage each other to continue the work of Romanticism by rejecting the current academic and accepted art of the time, which included realism, anything imaginative, nostalgic or historical. The group became known as Impressionists after Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise in 1872. Their work redefined the illusion of depth in painting as atmospheric perception advanced to include an additional layer of motion. Brush marks identified the passing moment with angle, direction and tempo, “open contours and related chromatic values were used for the figure and ground; form was invoked through the interplay of colors”. Rendering shifts in light and motion from atmospherics such as fog, rain, and wind, the artists also became known for painting en plein air. No longer working from their studios, they were able to paint directly from the impression of the moment, new light infused colors graced the surface.

As the Impressionist painters rejected convention they echoed quite appropriately the mode of the times: reality in reflection through light: a scientific embracement of the landscape as it shifted between rural and city, atmospheric and structured. Within the canvas lived a motif of the moment as highlighted by the sun and whatever the view at a particular moment revealed to its maker. Painters were driven more and more to render an “instant view” of such a moment.  Representations of these moments were evident in cityscapes and landscapes wherein the motif exuded an energy of movement from changing light and atmospheric conditions.

While Monet’s Impression Sunrise was the beginning of Impressionism, his own work evolved through the years to a deep investigation of light, motion, and time within a landscape. He pushed the motif to new levels of intensity which gradually separated him from his contemporaries and later set a path for modern art of the twentieth century. His work until 1890 held the primary concepts of Impressionism, painting in plein air while recording the moment of light as accurately as possible. Then, one day, “during a walk he was struck by a row of grain stacks ‘At the start, I was just like everyone else: I thought two canvases would be enough, one for cloudy weather and one for sunshine. But no sooner had I begun to paint than the lighting changed, two were no longer enough if I was to render a truthful impression of a specific aspect of nature and not end up with a picture from a number of different impressions.'”.

The series Grain Stacks altered and enhanced the making process to include the idea of anticipation. Creating a new paradox for himself, the motif evolved from Impressionism into a more personal approach to “render what was experienced”. By also now working on the canvases in his studio, the series took on a reflection of memory and sentiment thereby suggesting a mood through use of color, tone and lighting. As he explored additional series, his interest grew in how solid and seemingly unchangeable forms became altered and transformed in their appearance when atmospherics were at play. Associations of color harmonized within a “pictorial motif under metamorphosis with dematerialized definitions”. Growing less identifiable, the paintings took on an increasingly subjective interpretation. Monet’s interest grew away from a ‘topographical observation’ and more into the ‘alteration of perception over time’. Seeking a harmonious moment between the motif and himself, the work exuded a reflection of surface, intangibility and self.

At the turn of the century, Monet’s work further escaped the boundaries of Impressionism as he challenged the motif to render beyond what was a traditional pictorial method of a consistent horizon line. Moving away from such a dependence on form, his paintings reflected a sense of disorientation. Primarily working in his personal garden, the motif became one of intense study of water, foliage, lilies and the lush integrations of light and tonality. This new spatiality of form led a viewer to no longer identify with a reference point, instead, shifting the reflection from viewer to canvas in a “Romantic, holistic, harmonious way”. His late work of reflection landscapes created a fusion of an illusory motif of “walking through his garden” in a wide panoramic format. Scale and abstractions of expressive gestures intensified viewing and led the way to contemplation.

 

Thesis Bibliography: Chapter Two

Walter J. Freeman, “The Physiology of Perception”, University of California Berkley, 1991.

Barbara Novak, “Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825-1875”, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Karen Sagner-Duchting, “Monet”, Tachen Press, 1998.

Rhythm & Reflection II

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Today is a continuation of the first post.

A Thesis of Figure Ground Rhythm, Jamie Hahn, copyright 2010.

Chapter 1, section 2

“Movement seems to engage intimately with time…….The snow flakes within the landscape presents a seemingly still body and a rhythmic exchange between the senses reacting to the atmospheric changes. The result is a direct response of experience. Visual and tangible perception are keyed into a rather quick reactionary cognitive explanation of where the body is in relationship to other objects in space. Such direct attentiveness to the surrounding environment offers an opportunity to see more slowly. When the snowflake landed on your nose, you were still, calm, and focused. Within the furry of a million flakes fluttering around your stance, one became the object of study. The calm and focus occurred between the stillness of the flake at rest and the stillness of your stance, and then, your ability to see movement slow and pause. Time seemed to slow down. The flake changed pace, slowed in tempo, rested and paused before floating on to its final destination. In that time, that slow time, seeing motion gradually allowed a beautiful exchange to take place. This is exchange is what I like to call figure ground rhythm.

To introduce this concept, a conversation on what perception is needs to occur. Defining perception is something of a task. Perception involves the senses and is always working as we are always sensing surrounding stimuli. From the visual to the tactile, the senses keenly tune into an immediate interpretation of what is being perceived. From that percept, follows cognition or making sense, gaining understanding or acquiring knowledge. Defining perception in the dictionary finds eight notes of meaning; each slightly different from the other, although all pertaining to sameness. The intricate differences are interesting to compare and learn from as they contribute significantly to seeing and understanding. A few are listed here:

1. the act of apprehending by means of the senses, understanding

2. intuitive appreciation, insight, discernment, the result of perceiving

3. interpretation of sensory stimuli based on memory

In seeing there is learning. What is new is welcomed by what is known, memory meets discovery. All visual variables contribute: value of lightness, depth of field or spatial view, line, shape, texture and motion. And, all tactile variables contribute: sense of touch and balance as in kinesthetics and proprioception where the body moves in awareness of itself moving through space. Physiologically, perception is cognitive understanding of information gained by the senses. And, while a natural occurrence, is perhaps taken for granted in everyday experiences. Not often is it discussed in interactions with snowflakes. However, perception is vital in influencing everything from memory, to place, and orientation, to identity.

In a kind of rhythmic dance, the body relates and reacts to stimuli within a given environment. To grasp an understanding of perception, an investigation into how visual sense data is processed needs to be reviewed. Vision, or eyesight as science knows it today, involves research in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and biology. “When the eye assimilates information from the environment, the lens of the eye focuses an image onto a light-sensitive membrane at the back of the eye. The retina converts patterns of light into neuronal signals while the lens focuses light on the photo receptive cells of the retina, which detect the photons of light and respond by producing neural signals. The signals are processed in a hierarchical fashion by different parts of the brain.” While this explanation covers part of the ‘how’, what is still needed is the other ‘how’. This is how what is seen becomes known as a familiar object. Perceptual knowledge is also formed from memory, context and recognition. Perception involves thinking and reacting. Lines connect and form shapes. The circular object on the wall becomes a clock. A rectangular shape becomes a picture frame. Whatever may be in a line of vision is seen as what it is or is figured out based on context.

In psychology, one such explanation of perception stems from Gestaltism which formed out of the Berlin School in the early twentieth century. The theory “refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves”. By trying to define or explain how objects were being perceived, Gestalt psychology formed laws and principles. Later in the twentieth century, as science and psychology evolved, Gestalt was criticized for being merely descriptive; however, the ideas helped further research into the “perception of patterns and objects in relation to behavior, thinking and problem solving”.

The principles of Gestalt systems come in the forms of: emergence, reification, multistability and invariance. Samples of emergence show a scene of directional shapes made up of black spots against a white ground. The rhythm or variance of location of the spots lead the eye to see the whole first and then, see the parts. Reification is a construction of perception also from such spots and how they are arranged in a directional pattern. The spatiality of a shape is formed between the positive and negative spaces to convey a suggested contour shape. In multistability, ambiguous shapes shift back and forth from a positive to negative outlining two or more possible objects. This figure ground relationship is most well known in the vase/figure/face illusion where the shape contrasts with figurative lines. Finally, invariance is ‘simple geometrical objects being recognized independent of rotation, translation and scale’ in various directions including different shades, textures and lighting.

In addition to Gestalt principles, the laws were designed to explain visual perception as an experience of sensation which lead to the interpretation of such. Closure, similarity, proximity, symmetry, continuity, and common fate are defined here:

  1. Closure: the mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation in order to complete a regular figure
  2. Similarity: the mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. Similarity might depend on form, color, size or brightness.
  3. Proximity: spatial or temporal proximity of elements may indue the mind to perceive a collective or totality
  4. Symmetry: figure ground relationships in symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance
  5. Continuity: the mind continues visual, auditory and kinetic patterns.
  6. Common Fate: elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.

Colliding with visual data input to the retina is the constancy of motion and depth. Each contribute simultaneously with the cognition of what is being seen and interpreted. When elements within a scene are moving, both speed and direction are processed. Studied in neurology, engineering and psychology, motion perception is outlined in two orders. The first order examines the process of figure ground when the motion of an object differs in lightness from its background. One example is a black bug walking from one side of the wall to the other. A simple motion detected by a simple sensor in the retina. The second order of motion is when a moving shape is ‘defined by contrast, texture, flicker or some other quality that does not result in an increase in luminance  or motion energy’. This order is considered a weaker ‘temporal resolution’ of the moving stimuli. When integrated, the visual system can detect various parts within a two dimensional field of view and differentiate this view from a ‘global’ or three dimensional representation of moving surfaces and objects.

The ability to see three dimensionally is derived from depth perception. Right alongside is the sensation of depth, which allows the body to move and respond to an environment based on the distances between objects in spatial relationship to the body. Each perception involves visual clues from both eyes and input from just one. Binocular vision is more about depth and stereopsis while monocular is on size and objects at different distances appearing smaller or larger depending on location and comparison. Both types of vision contribute to how depth is perceived in what is called motion parallax. The body in motion changes or alters the view of stationary objects within a scene. This shift in background to object helps to give cognitive cues as to the relative distance between the object and the observer. In physics, “if the information is known about the direction and the velocity of movement, motion parallax can provide absolute depth information”. One example of this is when driving in a car, objects closest appear to not move at all, they seem smaller and less detailed. When driving, our visual percept of motion heightens our sense of kinetic depth perception. Objects that appear to be changing in size; bigger for instance, begin to feel closer. The brain uses kinetic depth perception to sense reaction time known as TTC “time to contact” depending on velocity and allows our visual information to guide away from a possible collision with the enlarged and too close object.

A balancing act occurs when motion between the close objects and the distant objects relate to the figure (the body) in space thus becoming a multi-dimensional figure ground percept. In time, as motion and movement cause reaction per perception of view and of detailed focus, a rhythmic exchange occurs between the figure and the ground. In the concept of figure ground rhythm, the figure is the body as it moves in reaction to and in relationship to the ground which is the environment, therein. Rhythm is based on time as it shifts from moment to moment, viewpoint to viewpoint. Joining this dance of perceptual interaction is a key element related to time: light.

Chapter 2 will begin with the next post.

References: The Physiology of Perception, Walter Freeman, University of California, 1991

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rhythm & Reflection

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Figure Ground Rhythm is a concept I’ve developed in my research of making time-based interdisciplinary artwork. And, now has also become the title and concept of this website/blog. My work has previously been on a somewhat typical artist website, a place to view the pieces and information about my research. I’ve decided recently to change the old format into something more interactive. Writing has always been a part of my work, either in poetic form as a preface to an artist book or in research form in my MFA written thesis. My goal with this website/blog is to write about my work and also include excerpts from my thesis which I may respond to as each entry evolves. I hope to reach a wider audience in the writing and art community as well as social media outlets for shared ideas and thoughts on contemporary discourse in art, education and community.

What is this concept of Figure Ground Rhythm? I developed this idea from both my art practice and my interest in the research that led to my written thesis. I graduated from NYSCC at Alfred University with a MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts in 2010. The thesis research involved making my work and also, writing about how the work evolved and my particular interests in subjects that contributed to my overall concept. The written thesis is in the form of a self published artist book and resides at Scholes Library at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. Until recently, it also existed as a PDF document on my previous website. And, now, the writing will live here in the form of posts, entries of selections from various chapters.

A Thesis of Figure Ground Rhythm, Jamie Hahn, copyright 2010.

Preface

being mesmerized by a spatial density between atmospherics and figure ground relationships within a landscape.

in search of orientation, an awareness of presence in time, in history. a place of familiarity, a kinship within a figurative environment…

a meditative space. a reflection on time, light and modulating surfaces.

being saturated by an atmospheric rhythmic shift in perception and sense of expectation…

Chapter 1: section 1

“Lightly, almost in a fine mist, the snow falls. The falling is multi-directional. Like a wave or a strong current, the mass of flakes shift from left to right, up and down, diagonal, forwards and backwards masking clarity. Through the blinds, the perspective from here portrays a view almost like static television noise. The pine tree shape is fuzzy, the suspected distance or depth of view is altered. A focused eye can see branches swaying through the rapid haze of snow falling. The static eases, the tree is clarified. A constant flurry of movement reignites, and the dotted air obscures vision once again.

Outside in the flurry of falling snow, time feels different. Accumulation of snow takes time. Flake by flake the sea of white rises and covers the previous scape of ground. Standing within this hazy, damp atmosphere, accumulated time meets the moment, and an overall point of view meets focused attention from the whole scene to the one tiny flake that just landed on the tip of your nose. Catching a flake and inspecting its uniqueness suddenly draws intensive focus to how the multitude of them could possibly create a mask of white to every other shape, contour, contrasting texture, light or movement within view.

Shifting focused study from the tiny flake to the grand view of swirling masses is almost dizzying. Standing there with this kind of focus on the tiny amongst the many of similar form, motion and time move differently. Whatever the background, as hazy or masked as it may appear to be, is mostly still. Standing too, feels still. Passage of the moment slows with an intensity of watching single flakes travel through the atmosphere and make their landing. Patience is required to watch the entire journey as the flake nestles into its new home and gently blends into a new surface becoming less dimensional, less affected by movement.

As the flurrying diminishes, new focus is allowed to rest on the still forms. Trees, grasses, plants and the shape of the surrounding land can now be seen clearly. The dusting of white may alter their previous shape, but overall, these forms have returned to recognizable states of being. Before moving away, attention may be given to some movement of less intrigue. This is the movement of what appears to be still. This is the form that appears to be constant, reliable, known, definable as such and such. And, yet, with focus, it moves, and shifts dimensionally. The brush, the grasses, the leaves, the tree branches, the water in the pond, the clouds in the sky. Eventually movement within the standing position becomes clear and a realization occurs: motion is an ever present constant. Movement seems to engage intimately with time.”

The next post will continue with section 2 of Chapter 1.