Performance is a way
to think through the visual and structural ideas of a film.
Organized around long-exposure photography,
rotary mechanisms,
and picture formation,
this process holds the lens open long enough for darkness to register.
The work draws from the Zone System,
a photographic convention developed by Ansel Adams and
Fred Archer for determining exposure and
the development of picture values.
The opposing endpoints of the continuum are
Zone 0 (pure black) and
Zone 10 (pure white).
In-between are near black, dark foliage, middle grey,
textured snow,
and black materials.
A suspended fabric cylinder is activated by bass frequencies
and bodies traveling around its perimeter.
It functions as a resonant chamber,
lens,
and spatial instrument.
Tessa Pattern is both a figure and a system.
The name originates in the Black Forest where Tessa Pattern
was educated at the Technical School for Clockmaking.
The school is connected to a clock museum by an underground tunnel where
time is stopped and counted.
The Clock Museum is at the center of the forest,
built on a circle shaped counting plate with 6 cutouts.
The building makes 2 revolutions to generate the form in 12 hours.
In the film,
Tulip,
Tessa Pattern’s instructor,
made a graph pattern on a
glass divider with a choreography software program
that pushed the room to rotate at
irregular angles.
Lighter dances
insulated and isolated
the environment of darker dances
inside the room from outside elements and
emphasized the embodiment of qualities
and gradients tones.
