BLACK HOLE
black hole pictures 2004-2008
A black hole is sensed by the intense activity at its edges. It is a place where things go when they get lost between departure and destination A black hole is the result of the inward collapse of a massive star, which occurs when the star burns out on fuel. It is a gravitational field so intense that its escape velocity is equal to or exceeding of the speed of light. In the same way that a car needs gasoline, a time machine needs to have fabulous amounts of energy. One either has to harness the power of a star, or to find something called exotic matter (which falls up, rather than down).
The body of work titled ‘black hole’, includes 28 13x20 C-prints and a 9 minute video animation. All of the work is derived from a set of photos which I shot over a period of six months, at one location with a point and shoot 35mm camera. The location is a street corner where castaway objects are left, appearing one day and disappearing the next. Over time the scene began to appear to me as an event; one in which these seemingly isolated and forlorn objects became part of a vast geopolitical story unfolding from the past and the future simultaneously.
I am fascinated by this idea of simultaneity; the experience of looking at something and perceiving a process or set of connections set in motion in another dimension, or on another scale. I want to perform this continuously present extra-reality pictorially through the intrusion of another surface and the creation of a tableau reminiscent of an image on screen. By disrupting visual conventions and casting doubt on the material status of the artifact, I am attempting to evoke a historical moment in which our relationship to mass-produced objects becomes metaphysical.
While making these pictures I was thinking about the energy of the West Coast, finding associations between frontiers and nomadism and feeling the ghost of frontier mentality embedded in the landscape. I was also thinking about the frontier, in Bruce Sterlings terms, as being found in the waste of a culture. I wanted to transplant evidence into a temporally open body. Here castoffs inhabit the same space as goods not yet sold and mingle with objects that are still in use.