time and again is a yearlong time-lapse video composed of still images shot from a fixed vantage point. Working within a predetermined process, I photographed the same scene every half hour for a period of one year, starting January 1st, 2004 and finishing on December 31, 2004.  The scene is looking down into a garden and an adjacent yard. Over the course of the 2 hour 16 minute video one witnesses both small incidental changes of isolated localized movement – the sudden appearance and disappearance of a squirrel, or branches succumbing to the weight of rain – and major changes such as the destruction and reconstruction of a garage. Randomness meets order while nature and culture mix.  

The key concerns in this work are time and duration. In the genre of landscape photography/painting one observes the passage of time through the four seasons as a subtle meditation on temporality – a still life in motion. In contrast to this subtlety is the mechanical movement of one image following the other, processed with only a slight video transition, to create a staccato movement like a clock ticking. The decision to have the movement more pronounced than fluid and filmic is a nod to early Eadweard Muybridge motion studies – freezing and releasing time.

Conceptually many artists have dealt with similar concerns – some I knew of before I made the piece (like Andy Warhol’s Empire) and others I learned of later when I was considering the finished work. I like the idea of there being a lineage of people looking at landscape and the environment and dealing with natural/ organic along with technical/mechanical processes. In time and again, the window is a framing device and all other details of the window frame are masked out. (The use of the window as a framing device is also used by Michael Snow, amongst others.)

To examine the passage of time is nostalgic – even melancholic – looking back. When I made the piece I started to think of a self-referential element and decided to place the camera now in the position of the birdhouse and indeed “look back” at the house. The birdhouse, which had been observed for over a year, was now the observer. I installed the time-lapsevideo of the comings and going in the house itself inside the birdhouse to correlate with the idea of inside looking out. This piece is entitled re: view.

Most people know me as a kinetic sculptor and are curious about the shift to video, but time and again is a study in movement. Although the subject I chose is in many ways quite mundane and “un/monumental” the piece/portrait is very intimate and personal. It reveals something about me – thatI have always been a window gazer.