first light, last, 2006, Portland, OR
video stills
An installation of projected video and multi-channel sound at the Portland Art Center’s Light and Sound Gallery is a meditation on the cusps of darkness and light, dreaming and waking, sound and silence, and a hopeful reminder of light in the midst of winter’s darkness. The visual component consists of hundreds of digital photo sequences of cloudless sky patches in the moments just before nightfall and dawn. These still images have been strung together as animated video vignettes, allowing the viewer to visibly perceive slow transitional cycles as they move through various shades of rich, saturated blue, from azure, to deep indigo, to nearly black; this “blueness” becomes a form or quality of light in and of itself. The result is at once abstract and hyper-real. The sound component is derived from a single 40-minute field recording made on the beach at Kalaloch, Washington while watching night visibly descend. This recording was radically filtered to extract twelve individual frequency bands that fade slowly in and out, hovering on the threshold of audibility, a shimmering presence that suggests a sense of anticipation or becoming. Collaboration with composer/sound artist Steve Peters.