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 performance that unfolds over time, accumulating into object-based form; here, that process will resolve as film.
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 image and apparatus. I began the project while living in Northern California, where memories of the landscape shaped by Ansel Adams photographs met the site of vacant tech campuses: mirrored windows, empty lots, and buildings based on sacred geometry. I considered what it’s like to take a large-format photograph at night in low light, when the camera’s lens must remain open for an extended period. Exposure—time made visible—became a central idea, connecting the project to the Zone System developed by Adams and Fred Archer to determine exposure and tonal range, spanning from pure black to pure white
Tessa Pattern draws from particular histories of the body in relation to Image-making: Oskar Schlemmer’s experimentation with black screens at the Bauhaus; Etienne Jules Marey’s motion studies at his “Physiological Station”; and Elliot Kaplan’s documentary on Merce Cunningham’s CRWDSPCR, where choreography was developed using LifeForms software. In LifeForms, the figure appears as concentric circles on a virtual stage where physical and computational logics converge. Translating this analysis from the computer into bodies tested all physical possibilities of his dancers.
The film will look at the transient/fugitive nature of the black and white darkroom, and how the black screen operates as both camera and stage where space is compressed and time expands. Black screens are cavities, chambers, or the camera itself: rooms in which material spatial conditions have been neutralized, and which are invisible in a photograph in the same way a performance stage is made to appear space-less. In performance, movement operates as a visible aspect of space, between flatness and depth. Film and photography allow the viewer to have an experience of close-ups and an immersive proximity to subject. A camera frames time without obstructing flow. Photographs in succession construct a lattice of temporal flow: a chain of delayed experiences and images. This film expands these ideas into moving image, dismantling internal structures of space and time, frame by frame.
Movement research with Dancer Marissa Ruazol and a Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst centered on countertensions—stabilizing the body while allowing it to roll off its own surfaces. This requires that organs such as the pelvic floor and spine open and pour as molten lava into the earth's floor, which establishes connectivity and stability to shift laterally off center and off vertical as an organism moving on low and mid-levels across the horizontal plane. Visualization techniques supported this process: the weight of the ocean over backspace, skeletal architecture rising from the earth, hands gliding beneath the skin.
The name “Tessa Pattern” comes from “test a pattern.” Tessa is both concept and person. A constellation of figures including bass players, sound technicians, dancers, and a Clock Maker, all connect to the Black Forest, both an actual region and a mythological site of origin and industry. At its center is 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, and governed at the intersection of 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 operating as both material and program, responsive and shaping.
