Archival pigment prints on MDF & Plywood
59.4 cm x 84.1 cm (x9) and 21 cm x 29.7 cm (x20)
2023
The changing vistas of the landscape are explored through Watch Your Feet, a 1228-frame montage. These images build together a one-hour walk taken towards an outcropping of badlands. The badlands begin far out of reach, in the distance but ever present. As the journey brings you into the landscape, they continually disappear and reappear and although there is continual approach, the badlands never seem any closer. The folding of time that is visible in the badlands, through their black bands, work almost as an image documenting the environmental happenings of each era. Watch Your Feet lets the viewer experience the past images of the walk that lingers behind as one moves forward in space, not dissimilar to the temporality of the landscape, constantly expanding and yet still displaying bands of time.
This work plays on the notion of Walter Benjamin’s montage theory. By allowing the past image to linger on screen, while the present unfolds on top of it, there is a dialogue between the past, present, and future of the one-hour walk. It unfolds with a recognition of where it is, where it is going, and where it has been and doesn’t obliterate the landscape that has already been traversed, leaving behind sky and ground as reference points, thus building out the map. This new form of work a becomes a walking cartography. As Watch Your Feet is a projected time piece, the viewers are asked to place themselves into the perspective of the photographer as the camera acts as a surveyor, recording the world around from the beginning of the walk to the end and suggesting a memory of land.
The unfolding of each vista in the journey never affords the viewers the satisfaction of closeness to the badlands. Finally, if we understand this work as an archive of a one-hour walk, each of the 1228 images hold their own unique temporal station and creates the closed loop archival circuit. The piece, as an archive, carries out an act of remembrance of a walk taken.