wildframe

Unprinted photo titled Rikyu View: The philosophy of grey depicting the the Jetty’s end at Picnic Bay, Magnetic Island looking out across Cleveland Bay. Photographed on a Shen-hao HZX 4X5-IIA Field Camera, Rodenstock 150mm Sironar S @ f/22, 90sec on Polaroid 55p/n film.

Rikyu View’s punctum is the perceived ambiguity of dimension. In spatial terms the foreground jetty appears three dimensional due to the presence of perspective markers such as shadows and vanishing point clues in the timber planking.

However, as the eyes are drawn out to fix on the horizon, three dimensionality is abruptly truncated to two by the dimensionless rendering of water and sky. A sense of spatial disorientation arises as the brain tries to deal with the perceived loss of depth perception and the eyes attempt to hunt continuously from foreground to horizon.

Temporally, Rikyu View heightens this ambiguity by juxtaposing time dilation with instantaneity. The static jetty is impervious to long exposures by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t move. However, over the same 90 second exposure, the clouds in the sky and the sea move constantly and perceptually we register the passage of time. As with the spatial ambiguity above our eyes feel tricked transitioning from the perceived instant of time depicted in the jetty to the dilation of time reflected in the waters and sky.

Simultaneously, our perception of the dimensions of time and space are disrupted.

Rikyu View was inspired by Japanese Architect Kisho Kurokawa’s writings on the particularly Chapter Six: Rikyu Gray, Baroque, and Camp : Ambiguity and Ambivalence.

~ by John Mackay on March 19, 2006.