Salt Water Sweet Water 2019

This work grew out of another project, “There’s Something in the Water.” I wanted to float a camera down the Mississippi River. Initially I wanted to capture images of the landscape surrounding the river because I was interested in it as a vein of connection. I was thinking about relationships between the Upper Midwest and the Southeastern United States, drawing on the story of Ibo Landing, Yemaya (a Salt water deity, for the Gulf) and Oshun (a fresh water deity, for the river). As I spent more time with the river I decided to try to focus less on making images but to deploy the phenomenology of sensing landscapes, allowing viewers the experience of being not the object of images but to be destabilized by being inside the image apparatus itself, feeling the hydrology of the water and witnessing the still and moving image that the camera obscura creates. Referencing the architecture of an inverted ship, it provided a cinematic experience.