Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 2012 to coincide with Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925. Further developed during a residency in Warsaw, it premiered at South London Gallery in 2014. My process often engages the public through performances that unfold over time, accumulating into object-based form.
The film presents an entropic world—low contrast, tonally flat, suspended in time. It examines photographic technologies that record and measure motion and data, mapping the body through both image and apparatus. I began the project while living in Northern California, where my memories of the landscape shaped by Ansel Adams photographs collided with the reality of vacant tech campuses: mirrored windows, empty lots, buildings structured around sacred geometry. I considered what happens when you take a large-format photograph at night in low light, when the lens must remain open for an extended period. Exposure—time made visible—became a central idea, linking the project to the Zone System developed by Adams and Fred Archer to determine exposure and tonal range, from pure black to pure white.
Tessa Pattern draws from specific histories of the body in relation to image-making: Oskar Schlemmer’s experiments with black screens at the Bauhaus; Étienne-Jules Marey’s motion studies at his “Physiological Station”; and Elliot Caplan’s documentary on Merce Cunningham’s CRWDSPCR, where choreography was developed using the LifeForms software. In LifeForms, the figure appears as concentric circles on a virtual stage where physical and computational logics converge. Translating this analysis from computer to body pushed Cunningham’s dancers to test the full range of their physical possibilities.
The film considers the transient, fugitive nature of the black-and-white darkroom, and how the black screen operates as both camera and stage—a site where space compresses and time expands. Black screens are cavities, chambers, even the camera itself: rooms in which material spatial conditions are neutralized, disappearing in a photograph just as a performance stage is made to appear space-less. In performance, movement becomes a visible aspect of space, oscillating between flatness and depth.
Movement research with dancer Marissa Ruazol and a Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst focused on countertensions—stabilizing the body while allowing it to roll off its own surfaces. This required organs such as the pelvic floor and spine to open and pour into the earth’s surface like molten material, establishing connectivity for lateral shifts away from center and from vertical. Visualization techniques supported this work: the ocean’s weight pressing into backspace, scaffolding rising from the ground, hands gliding beneath the skin.
The name “Tessa Pattern” comes from “test a pattern.” Tessa is both concept and person. A constellation of figures—bass players, sound technicians, dancers, a clockmaker—form her imagined community. All connect to the Black Forest, both an actual region and a mythic site of origin, craft, and industry, anchored by a Clock Museum and Technical School.
In Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture, time folds, space flattens, and perception pushes against its own limits. The work constructs world and body as co-evolving architectures—composite, contingent, governed by the anatomical and the mechanical: muscular, elastic, precise, and rule-based. It is built through recursive structures and fluctuating environmental conditions shaped by field and density. The center of both body and earth is not fixed but continuously formed through pressure and time, each acting as both material and program, responsive and shaping.
