Open Window
Windows, like pictures, frame space. They help us to perceive compartmentalization and containment amongst the unfixed and expansive nature of experience. They aid in the ability to delineate between here and there, you and I, inside and outside, private and public. When we put ourselves out of routine, these distinctions can feel dissolved.
I performed the recording of this work during a residency at MOMENTUM Worldwide in Berlin, Germany. Situating oneself in a new space (city, neighbourhood, apartment) is a precarious moment to inhabit. We task ourselves in becoming acquainted with the shapes and surfaces we will call home (for a while), and adapt our consciousness to new routines, sounds, and comforts.
This work explores the permeable experience of a new space via recordings made by placing a camera in relationships with panes of semi-reflective glass. In each of the 3 side-by-side channels of the panoramic piece, the camera looks through and/or past the edge of the pane of glass, producing further vertical delineations, and superimpositions. Throughout the work, the gestures of pivoting and panning allow the reflections inherent in the window panes and the reflections created by the glass of the recording apparatus to transform the otherwise banal scene. I step in as a figure within the space who impatiently jumps from task to task, navigating time and space alongside the camera. The camera is just as uncertain, panning back and forth. Simultaneous moments, spaces and sounds dissolve the delineations between the solitude of the apartment and the bustling street below. The 3 channels oscillate between maintaining their autonomy, and blending into a single strip of forms and colours. The sturdiness of the frame is put into question.