Katherine Bash's video installation, Abrisamento , captures a natural phenomenon that, for all its visual interest and beauty, is so common as to be unremarkable: images produced by the sun filtered through tiny gaps in a tree's canopy. These beams of light pierce the shadows beneath the tree, and create abstract patterns, sometimes called “sun-pictures,” that change according to the movement of the tree as it sways in the wind. Bash chose to project her video from the ceiling onto elliptical supports that seem to hover in mid-air, mimicking the projection of the sun's light down through the leaves of a tree and onto the ground, and perforating the space of the gallery with an event from the outside, or “natural,” world.
Abrisamento continues Bash's larger project of investigating our relationship with the world around us. With her videos, photographs, and text pieces, she explores the ways we perceive, and do not perceive, our surroundings. Over the past three years, Bash has developed a Field Guide to Observable Phenomena as a method for aesthetic practice. This open-ended project asks two key questions: Do things need a name to be perceived? How does our language dictate what we see and what we say, or what we do not see and do not say?
Naming is a fundamental element of discovery; when something new is learned or found, it is given a name and thereby enters a larger body of knowledge contained in reference books and encyclopedias, becoming available for other people to understand. These stores of knowledge are particularly attractive to children, whose intense curiosity drives a pursuit of new words to describe everything they see. When I was in elementary school, I used to sit outside with one of a set of such books called Golden Guides —my favorite listed butterflies and insects. I spent a lot of time identifying the bugs I saw in my suburban Miami yard, learning their names, but at some point I abandoned this project. The day arrives when we stop asking, “What is it?” when confronted with anything that is unfamiliar; this is the point at which we begin to place limits on our knowledge of the natural environment. The need for these limits is practical, in part, because mounting responsibilities take up more and more of our time, with the result that there is less and less time to read about bugs and natural phenomena. But it might also be due to a waning of inquisitiveness and wonder, as the passing days make our surroundings seem more familiar.
For Bash, the gaps in our individual bodies of knowledge about our environment present a space to think about how we live. In the introduction to her Field Guide, she writes: “It might seem strange that a guide is needed to help us observe that which is already here, but certain aspects of contemporary culture have damaged or dulled the skill of subtle perception which is one of the most important aspects of dwelling. The world is such a rich place, encompassing the horrific and sublime, and a dulled capacity to perceive prevents us from participating in the world within which we are already embedded.” (1) Bash is not advocating that we immediately begin to memorize the scientific names for every thing we encounter, but rather that we consider how a renewed sense of wonder might inspire us to imagine a different way of “dwelling in the world.”(2) Her focus on the everyday guides Bash's selection of phenomena to investigate. By definition, a phenomenon is something out of the ordinary that excites people's interest and curiosity. Although the sun-pictures are not as newsworthy as a solar eclipse, Bash proposes that they might be just as marvelous.
With Abrisamento , the glittering sun-pictures become precious, almost jewel-like in the gallery space. Isolated from their real-world context, they require a different level of attention. The isolation of this phenomenon comes not just through its insertion into the gallery, however, but also through Bash's manipulation of the image. The space within the video is blank. Bash recorded the beams of light but not the tree, nor the sound of the wind or the particular place where the light fell at just the right angle to become visible. This strategy renders the puddles of light that move and disappear before the viewer's eyes almost unintelligible as a trace or residue of an event that occurred in real-time, somewhere in the world outside of the gallery. Instead, the muted grey background suggests the clinical detachment of the laboratory, a cold place of objective investigation—as if Bash is conducting an experiment on the effects of light in the open air. The blank space within Abrisamento is deliberately disorienting, an effect augmented by the placement of the projections themselves.
This process of distillation seems simple enough. Bash's manipulation of the sun-pictures, however, did not happen in the digital editing room as we might expect, but through the use of a simple piece of paper. The result of this manipulation of the image—manipulation in the sense of handling, as well as control—is a concurrent manipulation of the viewer's own process of discovery. The video's blank space slows this process down. At first, the subtly shifting beams of light seem incomprehensible. They could have been generated by an algorithm in a computer program, or maybe even animated from a still photograph. Perhaps through prolonged inspection, however, they may become recognizable over time. These images remind us of something, maybe a particular day when we noticed this phenomenon while walking in the park or sitting in the backyard. If we search further back, we may even remember that first instant of recognition, and the time when practically everything around us needed to be given a name, recognized, and seen.
A child's sense of wonder and discovery collide with the familiar in Abrisamento . The video's blank background and absence of sound allow these associations to arise; by presenting a placeless space, Bash permits the particularity of our own memories to come to the fore. The smell of swing set hands, cut grass, and children laughing fill in the gaps within the gallery—the familiar elements of a sunny day at the park. The cold, empty background within the video paradoxically creates a space for us to insert our own memories into the piece. At the same time, our discovery of the sun-pictures in the rarefied space of the gallery might carry over into the world outside, and encourage us to see them as a phenomenal occurrence in our everyday experiences.
Amanda Douberley
March 2005
1. Katherine Bash, “A Field Guide to Observable Phenomena: A Tool for Aesthetic Practice ” (MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin , 2004), 2.
2. Ibid.