Looking Up | Looking Down

Looking Up | Looking Down was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art and Penland School of Craft in 2013 for the exhibition 0 to 60, The Experience of Time Through Contemporary Art. It consists of seven different works, with five installed at NCMA in Raleigh, NC, and two at Penland School of Craft in Spruce Pine, NC.

Looking Up | Looking Down explores temporal modeling of the sky and human-scaled chronicles on the ground over the period of a year. It uses the compellingly active skies of western North Carolina and the campuses of NCMA and Penland to understand how humans observe, interact with, and move (or don’t move) through the natural landscape.

Looking Up

Looking Up is a video installation comprised of more than 12 hours of time-lapse video taken over 9 months of the active western North Carolina sky directly over Penland School. With the sequences presented silently on a large video screen, the piece becomes a portal to witness rather than ignore the world directly above us. The videos are installed in public places that permit frequent viewing. The work is experienced slowly over days, as opposed to the rapid pace of traditional theater or screen-based venues.

Looking Down

Looking Down reverses the vantage point of Looking Up and becomes a chronicle of walking. Large, 16 x 9’ collages of more than 6,000 photos taken from a portable tethered weather balloon document where people walk on the two campuses during the four seasons of the year. Here, multiple forms of documentation record viewing angles, time shifts, and seasonal variances. It is the inconsistent and organic perspective that belies the technology and grounds the viewer in this distinctly human journey through landscapes.