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Sometimes a crystalline koan-like moment in life shatters to reveal what lays beyond the limits of everyday understanding. Such a moment occurred to me this past May. It started with an installation.

 Installation refers to, in the most basic sense, the process by which art is installed into a gallery space. Prior to the 1960's, installation meant white walls, frames, and spot lighting. The standard museum set-up.

However, the term installation has taken on new and varied meanings in today's art world. It posses nuances, many of which, can only be determined by the context in which the term is used.

Here is a simple guide of these nuances:

1) If you are in Brooklyn, and some hipster talks about their installation, they are most likely referring to the closet of a gallery they just payed five grand to show their work in the East Village.

2) If you hear a professor use the word "installation" in a lecture you can be assured said professor is referring to some post-modernist acid induced exhibit from '73.

3) If you hear an MFA student talk about their installation, they are referring to the last minute, last ditch, 3am feverish, rabid decision, right before a big departmental critique, tear everything off the wall and start all over again installation.

All joking aside, the definition of the word installation has evolved over time -- most sharply during the 1960's -- a time many critics claim to be the end of Modernism. Modernism was very much about definitions and a sort of nomenclatured code of organizing and thinking about art. The gallery space in modernist terms was thought of to contain, limit, control, and define a certain subset of artistic categories.

291 Gallery, New York,

The shift in understanding occurred when people began to think over and beyond such specificity in the arts. Conceptually artists and theorists began to think of art and the craft of art as two different things. This generated an attitude of wild experimentation and appropriation. What resulted was that installation and gallery space became a part of the art itself. 

In practical terms though, it simply meant that as art and artist defined space lost its defining borders, then, ideas, approaches, and techniques, became  more cohesive, more whole, more perfect, and ultimately, more universal. It's interesting to compare the gallery space of the early 20th century represented here in the 291 Gallery to Olafur Eliasson's  Weather Project installed in the Tate Modern in 2007. Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery set the standard for cutting edge art in the early 1900's. On the one hand, the 291 Gallery is clearly set on focusing, defining, and separating the art on the wall. In the weather project, the exhibition space is the art.

The Weather Project, Tate Modern, 2007

In terms of my own work, I can only state here, that whatever explanation I give, or photos I'm able to publish in this blog, due absolutely no justice to the work I did in May. However, I will do my best to explain what I did without going of into ridiculous reveries or pointless conceptual abstractions.

This is it, the big secret: I like to take "street" photos, off the hip, in the moment, fun photographs. However, I also like to play around with the 8x10.  It's difficult to explain to faculty that I simply can't choose one or the other. So, I did both. In order to use the two sets of images that I started to generate, I came up with a concept that would allow me to use them in one installation. Here are several photos of depicting the installation.

Walking into the installation, the first thing, is, darkness. The senses are narrowed.

The second element of the installation were the lightboxes. I used the actual 8x10 chromes and back-lit them. Beautiful to behold. There is nothing in digital that comes close. After the 8x10's, you might notice the spyglass.

The spyglass allows you to see what the character is seeing.

Below are the images that the character, that the viewer can also see with the spyglass. These images sort of float in the the middle of the room.

After looking at these images, one notices that they seem to move, almost shiver. You move closer, and realize there is more to see. Behind the images, there is a video being projected. I used the light of the projector to back-light the still images. This effect gave them the quality of moving, but staying still at the same time. Shivering. This is a view from the other side of the room.

Below is a selection of 8x10's and the smaller 35mm stills. I choose wetlands as my primary shooting location because it captured the essence of the place that I imagined to be inside myself where my most private thoughts reside -- it is a place beyond even dreams. Dreams provide us an escape. But there is no escape from this place.

The new character, who does not have a name, is living in a swamp. He explores the swamp and travels it. He has a suitcase with him which contains one important tool . . . a spyglass. The spyglass is a metaphor which represents the act of seeing. The spyglass is an illusory tool; extremely useful, but ultimately misleading in it's most literal sense: the object which appears close is actually not.

He is a type of collector. He collects what he sees. But what he sees is not what he gets. He may be looking at a living deer through his spy glass, but what he finds in his world, is something else entirely.

Think of this video as a moving still. Turn off the lights, use headphones, and just be with it.

  My installation incorporated not just the two sets of photographs I had taken (35mm and 8x10), but light, darkness, water, video, view photography, and street photography. I do not consider the installation multimedia in nature, but I conceive of it as a singularity. My conceptual and practical effort became to weave these desperate elements together to form a mass that in turn hid the differences, exclusivities, and conflicts inherent between street photography and the constructed image.