In Sarah’s untitled print, sound is conspicuously absent, as is landscape. This contrasts with her other work, where much of the landscape is visible, including evidence of human technological presence, depicted by railroad tracks and telephone wires. There too, one could be yearning for an imminent sound forever suspended by the still silence of the image and white space. Here, she exaggerates the silence by the white field of background with listening crows, forever poised in the moment before action. They could be watchers of humanity, they could be communicating with their own species or another. Either way, this image seems to convey a watchful waiting from the margins through suspended interaction and communication.
The print depicts a pair of crows standing to the lower right side of the page. They exist in a simple white background with not much evidence of space, save for a few scratched lines around the feet that simply hint at a ground plane. The crows are standing in a position of curiosity. They both appear to be listening for something, and they also lean towards the same subject of curiosity, heads cocked to the side, waiting for something beyond our window of sight. This object of disturbance that they wait for could be quite close, perhaps just out of reach, as the birds are so close to the image border. All of this conveys a psychological and social grasping at what is just out of reach.
Symbolically, crows are often an omen of death or connection with the afterlife. They are an intelligent and social bird, having a highly developed form of language and can even communicate with other species. They are a social and watchful type that observe life below from up upon the wires. As far as appearing in visual art, Kiki Smith created a circle of bronze crows in a departure from her usual explorations of the human body. They are lying lifeless upon the floor as a representation of an incident of crows falling from the sky, reportedly caused by pollution. She states, “The older you get, the less you're involved in your kind of internal, personal, psychic trauma or something and you're more just sort of being out and about and seeing your interrelatedness to other beings and to your environment.”
Jean-Luc Godard creates an opposite situation to Sarah’s print in his film JLG/JLG:
“The shrill and raucous call of a crow is superimposed over an unpopulated, barren country field marked by a path leading into the horizon. Not only is the crow conspicuously absent on the screen, but its sounds are conspicuously disjunct- too loud to be part of the landscape. This sequence, sometimes with the muttering voice of the narrator superimposed, is repeated at irregular intervals… But how are we to interpret it? Is it primarily a visual, pictorial image of a now lifeless place? Or does the sequence prioritize the audial track, presenting a warning cry, or a portent? I want to suggest that, consistent with much of Godard's work, this sequence does not hierarchize the aural and the visual. On the contrary, it fuses the two together as a sound image or rebus, and it is in this way that the sequence makes sense.” - Alter, Nora M, Camera Obscura, September 01, 2000
Sarah seems to be fusing sound and image as well, as she hints at both with subtle clues through ground lines and the action of listening. She also seems to relate to Smith’s statement about observing other social creatures and the environment. Here, both are done simultaneously, but with less attention to the physical environment. Or perhaps it is present in its absence. It is curious what comes across through selectively isolated elements of landscape.
May 23, 2010
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Environment is a key concept that I have been dealing with in my work this quarter. I am interested in the construct of different spaces. The spaces I am most interested in are intangible; our mental, and relational spaces, the space we find ourselves within the world around us, in context to our specific and individual lives. I really enjoyed the aspect of sound or lack there of, which Rachel found in within my piece. Sound was not something in the forefront of my mind while I created this piece, but it is about a moment. This moment is quiet. It is a space shared between two entities. My work has been a journey of discovering how to visually convey the different aspects of interpersonal relationships, and the spaces between them. As I created this piece, I was reflecting on a moment, which is not specific, but one I am ever seeking to experience, and perhaps have in small ways. It is a moment of connectivity. Of being at the same place at the same time with someone, thinking and feeling similar things, and being aware of the connection that has been established that is not bound by words, but a sense or feeling. It is an intimate, moment bound by unconditional understanding of place and presence. Much like a mother nursing her child. They are connected, each one existing within their own context, mother feeding and child eating, bound together by physical skin, yet deeper by an emotional bond, that often words can not describe. In this moment the mother is completely aware of her child, and the child although not in a developed sense of the word, is completely away of her mother. Words and thoughts are almost unnecessary in this moment; it is bound by the felt like.
ReplyDeleteWith my piece depicting the two crows, I am trying to set a stage for a similar moment, where words are not necessary. As if shared by a life long friend or sibling who knows you more completely than anyone else. The crows are posed slightly facing one another. They are aware of each other’s company, yet they are not the same being. There is nothing else around them because in this moment nothing else really matters. I keep thinking about a moment where I was watching a bird, and it was aware of me watching it. We were both timid. I didn’t want to scare it off, and it seemed to be apprehensive towards my movements. So we both remained still. In this moment we were connected, in action and situation; the bird watching me watch it.
Going back to the idea of sound and space, the context of these two things are muted within my piece. Yet my goal is that they are still present, but within a subliminal context. The relationship is the center, the subject matter. The undefined space and sound around the image makes the relationship between the two beings ever more present within the moment. My hope is that the viewer becomes engaged within this moment. As if they are what the birds are silently observing and listening to. Yet as the birds watch the viewer, the viewer is examining the context within which the birds exist. And perhaps in this moment the viewer will have an experience, in which I have explained. Or perhaps they don’t either way there is something that is being created. It’s a space for thoughts and feelings, a moment in time that I have set up to occur. And perhaps the knowledge of the possibility of that moment’s occurrence is the heart of what the work is to me.