As a Visual Arts Major at Occidental College, I produced for my Senior Comprehensive project, a fine press book titled The Gap (with an edition number of 10).
For this project I focused on the theme of motion and the relational existentialist ideas of time. Through the medium of the book, I address the inherently self-oppositional nature of presenting motion in the still, two-dimensional space without reference to time. I accomplish this by emphasizing through both text and imagery, the necessity of recognizing time as an element of motion. The imagery comes from photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, a figure who heavily influenced modern understandings of motion through his still and moving pictures. The text I have chosen comes from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, who in his thoughts on existence and being, addresses the present as simply a transition between past and present. Additionally, I have incorporated the book as a medium that requires movement and the passage of time in order to tie the viewer’s experience of the piece directly to my chosen themes.
Below you can see the finished product. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you can find both my full artist statement as well as the full text I chose to print from The Myth of Sisyphus.
The imagery printed throughout the book consists of a series of Eadweard Muybridge's runner images. The missing runner is "animated" as the reader turns the page and the runner is sequentially deleted. For example on the third page, the third runner is missing. On the fourth page, the fourth runner is missing, etc.
An example of the 4 different bindings I used to produce an edition of 12 books. The book was bound in black Moroccan goat leather and a taupe Asahi silk book cloth.
Artist Statement
For this project I focused on the theme of motion and the relational existentialist ideas of time. Through the medium of the book, I address the inherently self-oppositional nature of presenting motion in the still, two-dimensional space without reference to time. I accomplish this by emphasizing through both text and imagery, the necessity of recognizing time as an element of motion. The imagery comes from photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, a figure who heavily influenced modern understandings of motion through his still and moving pictures. The text I have chosen comes from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, who in his thoughts on existence and being, addresses the present as simply a transition between past and present. Additionally, I have incorporated the book as a medium that requires movement and the passage of time in order to tie the viewer’s experience of the piece directly to my chosen themes.
I found inspiration for this particular subject by first looking to Eadweard Muybridge, one of the first photographers to truly capture the nuances of motion in still photographs. His images display motion in a way that the human eye had never before been able to perceive. His work presents movement in a manner that enables the viewer to step back from their everyday understanding of motion as a single action and see it as a collection of normally imperceptible moments.
In my comprehensive project, I have taken one sequence of a runner from these early photographs by Muybridge and positioned the frames together so as to encapsulate those many moments in one single image or “frame”. While Muybridge isolated each position of a runner to create images that referenced the runner’s motion, I am recombining them to reinstate the action not as a single moment, but rather as a singularity of motion that contains the entire action. My chosen imagery emphasizes the existence of “the moment” as relational to past and present.
However, my project does not solely rely on imagery to engage the viewer. The passage I have printed alongside Muybridge’s runner comes from the existentialist thinker Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. I decided to include this section of text as a way to emphasize the importance of the past and present to the existence of the present. This existentialist view of time connected directly to my ideas about they way we as humans view time in relation to motion. Camus’ writing is particularly compelling and I found it to be particularly relevant to my own thinking and to this project. Additionally, I chose to include text in my piece as a reference to the traditional character of the “book” and to compliment the imagery with an element of pacing for viewer while they moved through the work themselves.
Every element of this project works towards a very specific understanding of motion and time and presents this idea to the viewer in a way that combines visuals, philosophy and a physical interaction with the piece. These different elements within this book, work to presents motion and time as connected in a complex relationship that ultimately questions common perceptions of motion and the very idea of the “moment.”
Text chosen from Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus
“Of whom and of what can I say: 'I know that!' This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.”
