Delphine (2000)

I think about nature and sculpt with images of it in space. I ask questions about reconstructing subjectivity, using nature and sometimes animals as my models, that is, "models" in the Bressonian sense. The way we learn from animals is all wrong. Science only looks at animals—drugs, electrodes, experimentation—to find out some stupid information that is not available to humans.

My idea is that to develop a new viewer, or a new frame of viewing, one must present as subjects those who are traditionally seen as objects. This is a place to begin. In order to transform a viewer who probably brings to the work a singular point of view, I present her with a disconcerting space, one with images imbedded in it that make it move, that change it. And these images undermine the singularity of time, space, and being. They do it through the image of nature/animals whose experience of time and space never seems to me to be singular and who express their experience of "present-ness" with their whole beings.

Delphine was shot with four cameras simultaneously: two digital video cameras held by the scuba divers and two super-8 cameras used by crew members wearing only snorkel gear. Thus, the shots from the bottom looking up are all on video and the shots from the surface looking down are all on film. These are inter-cut without regard for separating the different media; film and video are obviously cut together. The qualities of each are visible and the differing perspectives are also apparent. So clarity and atmosphere, grain and line flow into one another. The perceived immediacy and flatness of video and the perceived memory and depth of film give way to and mutually reinforce or deconstruct one another.

I am looking for something more than the visually arresting. I want to find something that is spiritually arresting—the ineffable, the sublime moment when the viewer loses herself (and one can only lose oneself if one has the sense of self to be open and unprejudiced) and is forced to reconstruct herself, that is, to re-find herself. This is the moment of transformation that is not depicted but is acted. It does not happen in the image—in the pictures—but in the space and in the viewer, and the dolphins are not its object nor its subject but its model—a model for rethinking the self.