Friday, January 17, 2014

from Alaska - more "Exercises for moving in between"....

This past fall I went back to Alaska for the first time in many years to start a new phase of my ongoing project "Exercises for moving in between". Exploring my relationship to change and place took me to my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska. Above is a still from a video I made there - a place I returned to day after day, repeating different exercises to see where they would lead.

The state is often romanticized (by artists especially) as the ‘last frontier’, a symbol of natural beauty and extremes. While beautiful, to me the grandeur of this wilderness reminds me instead of mundane moments in adolescence - smoking in birch forests, biking through muddy roads to get to a friend’s house to do nothing, dreaming of ‘seeing the world’ as I scanned the wide open forested valleys through the cracked frozen windshield of a pickup truck. Revisiting these places as an adult, I set up the tightrope (from my previous "exercises" in the project) as a starting point for maneuvering through time, both through the physical act of exerting myself and through the corresponding color photographs and video. This image is one of the places I ended up....

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