There are at least two ways of making work. You can start with a total vision of what you want to do, a script, and then execute it; or you can follow various internal intuitions, shoot a lot of stuff for no apparent reason, and then hope to discover miraculous connections, metaphors, and mysteries later. This is often a long shot.

We were just above the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park in Texas in November and it was about 90. I tried to rig a tarp for shade but it was a disaster, so I just looked at the patterns the tree's shadows made on the fluttering surface and shot it and then started thinking about Plato's Cave, appearance and reality, optics, projective geometry, the fascination early Russian artists felt for the fourth dimension, Duchamps and "L'étant donné", phenomenon and noumenon (an astonishing science fiction story I once read suggested that if a photon of light were to be slowed down, and thus destroyed, the entire universe would revert to its "noumenal", rather than "phenomenal", nature and we would then encounter things 'as they really are...'), about the notion of somehow taking this conjunction of light and surface further.

So in this gallery configuration, we first see the shadows of the leaves projected onto this tarp that is blowing in the wind. Occasionally, the wind blows the tarp with enough force to reveal what is behind- the tree that is making the shadow. But just as occasionally, a fan in real space blows the screen itself, on which this video is projected, with enough force so as to reveal another image-the Ur Tree, the Platonic TREE, as it were, that is behind all such contingent examples of "treeness."

My ambitions were thus to present a visual metaphor for the reality behind appearances; to produce an ephiphany about the way we think we know what we see and about the many layers of reality; to conjure air, wind, breath, and light in a kind of visual koan; to offer a magical demonstration of a higher geometry of thought; to play lightly with sign and referent; and to offer a dark spectacle that might become a kind of theater.

ALSO SEE

> Peter Rose: Pneumenon
> Artist's CV [114KB PDF]

EXTERNAL WEBSITES

> inliquid.com
> canyoncinema.com
> pewarts.org

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