Lessons from variations on a landscape
Abbas Akhavan at The Power Plant
To keep it short and sweet, it was persuasive the way Abbas Akhavan took a narrow, rigid and sharp space and a fleeting moment in time and spun it around to create a nexus - a central point where visitors can convene, the proverbial fountain in the middle of a cold hard and unforgiving concrete city where you go to take a break to dream, think or toss in a coin to make a wish. In the little Ashanti village where my people are from, it would be the water bearers’ well, a meeting point; the pumping heart of the community, giving life to and rejuvenating its men, women and children and strengthening them to carry on their respective journey.
I would probably need to go back to The Power Plant before year’s end if I am to take it all in at a much slower pace than I did today with Seba my new friend, but one visit was enough I think.
One thing caught my eye, however; two LCD panels showing nothing but green.
It took me back some 10 years ago when Astus taught the bunch of us in his NAFTI Level 100 Television class about chroma key; how employing the use of a green screen could allow you to add different picture tiers to recreate a new two-dimensional representation of reality, compositing basically.
For a moment I wondered why wouldn’t it be possible to think of the different realities we experience in terms of simple layering? I mean think about it, imagine if you will, that everything and everyone you have encountered, are encountering and will be coming across as just a single layer on and of its own, in a certain space and time. A physical manifestation.
On Variations on a landscape
To paint, capture a moment in a photograph or create a motion picture, an artist takes layering into account; everything to be included on or in the canvas or whatever medium will take the form of a single layer that when included, plays a necessary specific role and purpose. To omit a layer is to miss something in the big picture that could have done some good (or bad, still a role).
By being, I can see and somewhat appreciate everything and everyone as a layer and as having a layer — or many many different and diverse layers if we are looking through the refracting lenses of age, creed, geography, gender, race, sexual orientation etc; from the densest rock that is breathing really really really really really really really slow to me at rest, doing some 12 to 20 or so breaths per minute. . .life in layers in and of itself, all of it.
Knowing this, Abbas has given me the insight, an extra layer to consider for my photography craft where I could perhaps simply start seeing the persistence of vision undoing before me as layers also; a variation of different things, people, emotions, of whatever; all present and playing a part in the grand motion picture that is existence.
