How We Hold the Sun by Ariel C. Wilson

Issue 183

My studio practice currently centers around the paradoxes and failures of photographic representation, and in the mistranslation of the physical to the depicted. I notice how the photograph supplants the physical: I watch the sunrise through my laptop rather than stepping outside, spot a photograph instead of patching a wall. In response, I work to create space for the contradiction between the credence we give to the photographic image, and the inherent limitations of the medium. The moon I see through my iPhone camera could never be mistaken for itself, but I am still ordered to destroy my students’ inkjet prints of single-dollar bills. I find solutions by creating photographic objects and spaces that resist the illusion of indexicality: layered and transparent photographs, large-scale installations, sculptural prints, and live-feed video installations.

Photographs, moving or still, always ask me to be elsewhere. Their reductive (compressed, flattened, and distorted) nature never quenches the thirst of the embodied experience. In my attempts to preserve fleeting and sublime moments, I am always left unsatisfied yet I don’t stop trying. In recent projects, I collect and make low quality digital images and video to grapple with the futility of both my personal and our collective impulse to use photography to preserve or contain the transcendent. The moons likeness is far too immense and spectacular to be condensed into a jpg on my phone’s camera, with all its shadowed craters and metaphorical weight. I repeatedly refresh the webcam window to watch the sun rising at 30 frames per minute in Yosemite Valley as I sit in my apartment in Dallas. The flawlessly smooth gradient of the rising sun is partitioned through incremental time. With their failing indexical nature, the images I collect point only back to themselves, and to me. Perhaps the failing is in fact mine- Why do I watch the sunrise through the screen instead of stepping into my backyard with my morning cup of coffee? Why spot-heal the walls in my photographs instead of patching the drywall in the room? I am confronted with the fact that I often give more priority to the re- presentation than to the physical or the embodied experience.

A good photograph, I was taught, conceals that it is a photograph at all. In response, I’ve become increasingly concerned with the revealing moments of photographic failure. Bad photographs reject the indexical assumptions of the image, they are clearly not what they depict, though perhaps they are more honest as themselves. Low resolution, out of focus, and blurry images, like the ones contributed to my project, Bad Moon Photos, do not transport me to the moon. Instead, they reveal the grid of pixels that make up every digital image and remind me of both the cameras and my own constructed experience of vision.

Ariel C. Wilson (she/her) lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
www.arielcwilson.com | @ariel.c.wilson