Buckley’s Bewilderness meets quantum mechanics
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My “Bewilderness” photographic series is entering a new dimension.
Originally designed to be collaborative large-scale panoramas, setting curious on-goings in landscapes not particularly suited to the dress or activity, some recent experimentation is creating a different branch of investigation within the series.
This new direction involves layering of images to create a complex weave of shapes, textures, colors and forms. They are the visual equivalent to quantum mechanics, combining in a single image multiple places, times, environments and realities.
The series is inspired by work first undertaken in the creation of my work-in-progress experimental film, “Poem From Memory.” A collaboration with performance artist/model Laura Milkins (the model in all of the images here), the film is based on layering of partially transparent video segments to create the illusion of a new, surreal environment.
In recent months, a new layer on animation was added to that effort to introduce slowly moving large landscape panoramic images to the action as another layer of color and form. In turn, that decision led to the experimentation with layered still images.
Some look like a form of camouflage, others as though a science fiction time and space transporter is caught mid-dissolve. The images are mysterious, fluid and murky.
Most of all, the technique begs both further experimentation and the deliberate shooting of specific elements to integrate within new images.
Milkins and I met last week to outline the next shoot in the series. Since then I have found myself looking at the world with new eyes for texture, form, light and shadow, color and gradient. I am back in the desert, this time looking up and down rather than around for complex forms and textures.
And in the meantime I’m drawing up lists of potential items to photograph, as well as patterns I might wat to employ in distributing them within the frame. In particular I’m interested in seeing for glass and shiny objects will imact the resulting images as they are layered into the mix.
It’s often the experimentation that brings both the most fun and the most critical results to my work.
I’ll be continuing the experiment in the coming days with plans to submit several of these works for consideration in the 2015 Arizona Biennial Exhibit at the Tucson Museum of Art.
More to come!
Love these great images, Dan . .Thanks!
Gracias Larry! Can’t wait to get back into the next batch.