BEAUTY MEMORY ENTROPY

MAKING AND VISUALIZING

 

Fermeuse

Samantha Krukowski, DAAP, University of Cincinnati

 

[FERMEUSE will be exhibited as a solo show during the ATMOSPHERE 9 Symposium]

 

ABSTRACT

Fermeuse is a project in two forms: photographic and videographic. Over the course of five years, I took hundreds of photographs of the sea/sky intersection off the eastern coast of Newfoundland. These photographs are typically exhibited as 40”x60” prints. They were stitched together and horizontally aligned to create a video that is currently under consideration for screening at a number of festivals.

The view to the sea from the most easterly point on the North American continent is infinitely expansive and affords no stability of perception. The horizon there changes quickly, dramatically and so completely that worlds appear and disappear in minutes. Shifting integrity, the long space condenses and thins, retreats and advances, reveals and obscures, materializes and dematerializes, brightens and dulls. A striped black sea is separated from a matte gray sky by a wide, diaphanous white line. The blackness is weighted with dark gray fog, held away from heavy clouds by a wash of golden light. A bright cobalt sea is sharply delineated against a light blue sky. An impenetrable and claustrophobic fog obliterates any distinction between sea and sky. Gold resists silver though they join in a blurred touch. Fermeuse is the registration of a magical yet unnerving phenomenon visible from Pouch Cove, Newfoundland - it occurs in a largely untraveled, pristine, harsh and remote landscape. Occasional glimpses and photographs constitute attention, yet fail to communicate the immensity of the drama where the threshold of the axis mundi is suspended. The video is a timepiece that tracks individual moments of time while presenting as a rhythmic whole. It regulates horizontal unpredicability yet does not keep pace with the time it takes the earth to make a complete revolution around the sun, nor the time it takes the earth to complete one rotation on its axis. Fermeuse requires, in making and viewing, an enduring, slow and specific focus that is atypical in a society prone to split attention and simultaneous activity, instant connectivity and constant distraction.

 

BIO

Samantha Krukowski loves materials, images, spaces and time. Originally from New York and St. Louis, she was trained as an architect and art historian. She is curious about how objects, places and images exist and evolve in a society where information is inescapable, transferable and forgettable. She is inspired by the similarity and repetition of patterns and structures that are magnified by technology, attention and representation. Her videos, paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally; her book "Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man" was published by Black Dog Publishing in 2014. Samantha teaches design at the University of Cincinnati and prior was on the faculty of the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University and of the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin where she developed a program in experimental media.