The Forest: Before Dawn
2019
Light, shadow, lenses, and figures enact a static drama—a miniature set designed for a performance yet-to-be. This miniature set is my first cinematic object: a physical film still.
In The Forest: Before Dawn, miniature, 3D-printed statues sit atop rough- hewn wooden pedestals. The ground is a sea of lit wax, masquerading as a frozen lake. Light is projected through lenses nested between the branches of twigs like surreal trees. The lenses distort and magnify the shadows of the 3D printed statues, abstracting the shadows cast on the wall. Figure and environment are confused and conflated. I was inspired by Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 A.M., a sculpture that seems to freeze a single minute in time. Statues disrupt the barrier between stillness and movement. Are statues frozen bodies or animated stone?
By working in miniature scale, I can create a transformative viewing experience parallel to that of the immersive cinema-screen. Diminutive scale signals to the viewer an entrance into a world apart from their own, a world of the fantastic and mysterious. Miniature requires the viewer to search. Miniature is a possibility, it is potential. It is a site of potential movement, potential growth, and potential visibility. To perceive what is made in miniature transforms the viewer into a giant: scale is distorted and made plastic. In miniature, the physics of lived reality are called into question just as they are in cinema.
Made originally as a sculpture, The Forest: Before Dawn became a series of photographs. Through the abstracting lens of photography, the scale of the set is transformed: in a photograph it could be human-scale. Actors, dancers, or singers could skate across the icy surface reciting lines or executing choreography.