Steven Evans
In our work, walking is both a process and a product. It is an act we perform to understand, experience and reveal meaning – both for ourselves at the outset, and for those who visit the sites we have been engaged to design. The projects showcased in the installations treat walks not only as organisational devices within a larger landscape, but also as active, physical carriers of meaning. In many ways, these walks are a retracing of our own original exploratory steps on the site – an enhanced echo of our first contact with the site – both physical and analytical. Like the sites themselves, we want our exhibitions to be walked to be understood. Although these are necessarily reductive experiences of the sites themselves, we hope they are expansive experiences taking the visitor well beyond the punctuated iconic ‘money’ shots. Like the Borges map 6 that became so detailed that it was the true size of the world, we try to find a way to give a sense of the slow pace, the subtle changes in detail that you absorb as you walk between the moments of drama. We re-engaged Steven Evans to reshoot the Podium – he had taken all of the original iconic shots – but this time to shoot it in a measured pattern, using stop-frame animation as the model. Simultaneously, Chris Pommer 7 reshot the Grounds of Remembrance using the same model. The photographic exercise became a form of mapping – clockwise, counter-clockwise, morning, night, filled with a crowd, empty. Testing the pattern of the photographs became part of the project – using different measured equal paces.
Which pace most clearly depicted the experience, the nuances without, like Borges, making the visual depiction so detailed that it was the true size of the experience? And, how did the pace differ between one project and another – one highly urban, the other more natural? The camera looks straight ahead, but we don’t. We move our eyes constantly to take in the environment. Although a flipbook could passively reproduce the filmic sequentiality of the experiences, we want the experience to be more physically active and necessarily slow. We want to explore what the relationship of the central walk is to the punctuation points; with the two installations we were able to explore and compare approaches. * These exhibits celebrate the long, slow pace and space stretched between obvious precious moments, contemplating in equal terms the value of both, and challenging how we depict these experiences outside of the spaces themselves. Every walk may be unreproduceable, but we relish the struggle to reproduce them, embedded with the element of time. c
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PLANT Team: Lisa Rapoport, Chris Pommer, Mary Tremain, Vanessa Eickhoff, Peter Os- borne, Angelica Demetriou and Zac Mollica Photography: Dublin: Stephen Evans and Chris Pommer Nathan Phillips Square: Steven Evans
6 ‘Del rigor en la cienza’, Los Anales de Buenos Aires , vol. 1 March 1946 7 Chris Pommer is a partner at PLANT Architect Inc
Special thanks: Arrow Graphics Midtown Reproductions
6 ‘Del rigor en la cienza’, Los Anales de Buenos Aires , vol. 1 March 1946 7 Chris Pommer is a partner at PLANT Architect Inc.
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