Archival pigment prints on MDF & Plywood
59.4 cm x 84.1 cm (x9) and 21 cm x 29.7 cm (x20)
2023
Can't you see? There's no detail, only expanse is the most traditional display of technical images in this body of work, offering a look at the use of display as a tool for interrogating landscape in the gallery, as well as the integral subject matter of the images themselves. The images alternate from 59.4 cm x 84.1 cm (A1) to 10.5 cm x 14.85 cm (A6) framed by 21 cm x 29.7 cm (A4) plywood boards. The large and small photographs are purposefully hung closely in order to force the viewer has to move closer to view the smaller image and backwards to properly view the larger image. The larger images in this series are expansive photographs of vast, open space. The smaller images showcase the display of human presence in the landscape and tighter details of the badlands or other natural elements.
If we understand human activity and objects as fragments that exist as an embodiment of time, the unfolding of human activity within landscape becomes a constellation of the past, present, and future colliding as one present moment. In Can't you see? There's no detail, only expanse, the vast images lack any presence of human inter-activity. The presence of human dwelling is represented in the smaller image, where details are only uncovered through a closer inspection of the photograph. Placed in extremely close succession, the viewer has to back out to see the next image, which showcases of vast and unending space. The details of the small image become hidden once again. Can't you see? There's no detail, only expanse begins to show the presence of Ingold’s temporality of the landscape as human activity (and shallow time) is incorporated into vast time. Through the undulating of movements of the viewer to uncover these details, the technical image replicates the bodily experience of feeling the contours of the landscape. The viewer has to use their body to uncover the details, just as they would to move through the landscape and to participate in the taskscape, forming an interactivity with the image objects.
Can't you see? There's no detail, only expanse offers a tool for the display of images that works within the process of being-in-this-world, where the temporality operates in its own expansive time. The piece, although using the fragmentary nature of the technical image, begins to unfold a story of landscape that does not unhinge it from its presence of vast space and vast time. Through its interactive nature, the work creates its own landscape by integrating movement into the viewing experience of the technical image, fundamentally shifting the traditional flat image into a new vista, forming a constellation in both the images and in the display. It uses the sites of human activity contrasted to sites of expansive landscape to suggest the unfolding of the taskscape, and of the dialectical image of the landscape Ingold draws out, where the past ruins and present interactivity create an allegory of the futurity of the vast time in the landscape.
The temporal nature does not exist in the technical images on the wall in this piece, but it comes distinctly in the editorial decisions and curation of images, large and small, as well as through the display methods. It is the only piece in the show that exhibits this way, and thus allows for a greater analysis of the traditional display methods of technical images as a way towards a dialectical image of the landscape.