In The Roaring Garden, 2015
8:39 Minute 4k Video
Originally commissioned for a show at the deCordova Museum entitled Walden Revisited, In the Roaring Garden, (2014) involved the creation of floating camera obscura, to record a video of the landscape as it was projected upon a 1:5 scale model of Thoreau’s cabin reimagined as an artist studio. In the resulting video, a projected image of the landscape moves slowly over the interior of the one room cabin illuminating the walls, furniture and tools within the space. Over the course of the 18 minute video, trees, clouds and sunlight animate these objects as the sun rises and sets creating virtual days and nights.
In contrast to the sublime stillness of watching a projected image of the landscape move across the static objects of an artist studio, In the Roaring Garden (2015) disrupts this illusionistic space by closing the aperture to the outside world and physically rotating the model upside down. The result is an uncanny choreography of furniture sliding up walls while shafts of light periodically illuminate the windowless interior through the narrow cracks between the floor, walls and ceiling. The entire set, model, props and rotating armature, floats upon a raft on the Hutchinson river in the Bronx, NY. Located at the edge of New York’s northern most borough whose numerous transportation networks and massive public housing infrastructure surrounds this site from three sides, this landscape remains entirely invisible in the video, yet its presence is felt through the drone like sound of passing cars.
