American (p)Ark

This film’s title is a reference to Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Arc”. I chose to reference this film because I think it is very much related to my own work and has influenced my artistic practice in exciting ways. In my own sculptural work, I am concerned with time. I often use film and video techniques to explore the nature of time. In these explorations, I have become interested in the ways in which our personal perceptions of time are related to our historical conceptions of time and vice versa. I also have been drawn to shooting things in one take, to the point that it has become sort of a working practice for me.
I was struck and inspired by the way Sokurov correlates time and space within the frame of the film, the continuous imagery woven through maze like spaces sets history on a single grand stage happening all at once. This film, of course, is mostly concerned with the museum space and the palace itself within the context of St. Petersburg and Russia, so it may seem strange that I would claim my own work to be within a similar vein, but I think that is just a matter of every artist’s subject matter being inherently personal. Even though I don’t make work particularly about museums or Russian history, the larger themes and issues he deals with, however, and as I mentioned his working methods resonate with my own processes and interests.
To make this specific work, I started by filming a series of Neighborhood parks in 3 of the 5 NY burrows and in 4 neighborhoods in Philadelphia on HD Digital video. I was interested in public space, the way people utilize it and the role it plays in shaping communities and cultures. I was specifically interested in NYC and Philadelphia because they are places where I have lived and spent most of my life. I have personal history there but it is connected to and basically resultant of the intense cultural histories that exist in both cities. They are charged spaces. It’s not quite the museum space or St. Petersburg, but they are spaces and histories that are connected through different scales of time. The way I handled these elements, I would be so bold as to say, is also in line with Sokurov’s handling.
In the parks I limited myself to one 360º panning panoramic shot per space. It felt like the most honest way to document them, “in one breath” as Sokurov might say. They weren’t exactly 98minute takes, but again, relative. For the entire week that I was filming it poured rain, so this method also made it easier to get the shot and stay under the umbrella with the video equipment and tripod(a practical consideration, but not ignored in the conceptual architecture of the work.) As I traveled from park to park, space to space, I was struck by the fact that without anyone in them (as a result of the bad weather) and with the visual lubricant of the rain water, these parks all seemed to bleed together into one setting. The communities that inhabit them are what give them their life, but without those inhabitants they are just a continuous carousel of blacktop, fencing, cement, basketball hoops, pre-fab jungle gyms, etc… As I processed the footage I was struck even harder by this fact , I tried to string all of the shots into one long shot in a video editing program but the honesty was gone and there was no life to the footage.
I say the honesty was gone because it wasn’t a single breath anymore, and even though the imagery was continuous as result of the redundancy of content, the visual was not seamless and thus neither was the time experience. I say the footage seemed dead because it was uninhabited. I found one solution to both problems and it came from within the history of cinema, to be exact, within the history of pre-film experimentation with moving images. I decided to draw the entire thing onto a 30ft. long scrolling panorama. My original intention in using the HD camera was to capture the honesty of a “one breath” take, and now that honesty had been lost so I left the video behind for a different type of honesty, honesty of the hand. I knew that I trusted my personal history of drafting with line to execute the representational imagery and was conscious of the ability of the hand along with the imagination to fabricate fictional connections between gaps in reality that will go unnoticed by a viewer. To make up for the uninhabited space, I chose to inhabit the space with my hand, actually traversing the space with my drawn line.
I traced a projection of the video, constantly scrolling my paper to match the drawing with the next video frame. It was a process a bit like rotoscoping. When I reached the end of a full take, a full circular pan around a single park, I would fabricate a structural transition to the next park using perspectival knowledge and exploiting the appearance of common visual imagery in all the parks, especially the chain -link fencing. I was able to stitch together five different parks, five different shots, five different breaths, into one sprawling continuous park/shot/breath. I filmed the drawing using a stationary camera with the panorama scrolling by which gives the effect of the camera panning through the actual space represented in the drawing.
It becomes an imaginary American dream landscape set in the actual historical landscapes that have shaped what it means to be American. It is dream-like in that multiple spaces are folded in to one space seamlessly, and also the charcoal line is visceral as a material, but simultaneously transparent in its ability to communicate space to the lens of the camera. Sokurov also is able to fold multiple times and spaces into one entity. He also compares the aesthetic of the film to that of a painting, where my film is actually transformed into a drawing and then back into film. I was commissioned to make this piece by an artist organization called America: Now and Here, the given objective was to travel around some part of America and make a work that engaged contemporary America through its History. I called the piece American (p)Ark.