Over three days in May 2016, poet Nicholas Bradley and I cycled and hiked from the mouth of the Santa Ana River to the top of San Gorgonio Mountain—the low and high points of the Santa Ana Watershed, respectively—and back again. Using body-mounted digital cameras, we recorded one image each minute, documenting our passage through this topographic space. The Santa Ana Fall Line films are ten variations of the journey distilled into a single hour, one channel per body, each filtered through pixelation that shifts the resolution from pure abstraction to discernible figuration; the accompanying score by composer Alex Lough is equivalently processed. The experience alternates between recognizable time-lapse footage and ambiguous fields of pure color, and—at some point in space and time between, different in each film and for each viewer—a sudden perceptual shift between these two states.
As first installed in Suburban Ecologies, the films were accompanied by a wall installation created from several hundred still frames per channel that served to represent the journey more instantaneously.
Santa Ana Fall Line (moving) #1 — #10
Ten two-channel videos, each 1:00:00, 2020. Audio by Alex Lough.
Wall installation of 4” x 4“ machine prints, each side 60”H x 96”W, 2020.
