Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture was initially commissioned by MoMA in 2012 as a performance to coincide with the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925. The work was later developed during a residency in Warsaw in Fall 2013 and premiered at South London Gallery in 2014. One final chapter remains: a film. My process often engages the public through performance that, over time, accumulates and culminates in an object-based form.
The film presents a dystopian, entropic world: low contrast, tonally flat, shadowless fields, time forever in suspension. Tessa Pattern is a study in technologies that record, measure, and trace motion, data, and time—mapping the body through image and apparatus. I began the project in 2012 while living in Northern California, where my memory of the landscape—shaped by iconic Ansel Adams photographs—were in opposition with the experience of driving past rows of vacant tech campuses: mirrored glass windows, empty parking lots, and buildings based on sacred geometry. I thought about the future—light and dark, rolling hills, red and white, blood and bones, sex, movement notation, and a sky pinned to the edges of a world. 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. That duration—exposure—is time rendered visible. The entire project draws upon the Zone System, a photographic system developed by Adams and Fred Archer to determine exposure and tonal range, from Zone 0 (pure black) to Zone 10 (pure white), with gradients in between.
Tessa Pattern draws from a range of references: Oskar Schlemmer’s experimentation with the human figure and black screens at the Bauhaus; physiologist Etienne Jules Marey use of the camera to scientifically study the mechanics of locomotion at the “Physiological Station” that he built in the late 1800’s for experimenting with tracking linear movement patterns in a single frame; and the documentary by Elliot Kaplan about the making of Merce Cunningham’s CRWDSPCR, which included choreography developed with the LifeForms software. In LifeForms, the human figure appears as concentric circles on a rotatable grid—a virtual stage where bodies are viewed from multiple angles. Translating this analysis from the computer into bodies tested all physical possibilities of his dancers - exact angles with their arms and feet allowed a change of phrase quickly and methodically, transitioning from one keyframe to the next.
The film looks at the relationship between photography and performance, exploring visibility, the transient/fugitive nature of the black and white darkroom, and black screen technology. Photography and performance have each evolved through collaborations traversing disciplines. The “black screen” is a central element in this evolution. Black screens may be cavities or 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. Time is shaped and experienced differently in photography and performance. 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 for Tessa Pattern has focused on the spreading and spatializing of recorded image from actual space to screen and screen to actual space of the viewer. In rehearsals with lead dancer Marissa Ruazol and a Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst, we’ve worked with counter tensions that stabilize the body while enabling it to roll off its own surfaces. This process 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 support this research: the weight of the ocean over backspace, bonelike architecture/scaffolding rising from the earth, hands gliding three inches beneath the skin— all related to landscape which Tessa Pattern documents.
The name Tessa Pattern comes from ‘test a pattern.’ I imagined Tessa as sometimes a concept and sometimes a person. In addition there are bass players, an electronic composer, dancers, a Clock Maker, and an instructor named Tulip Pattern that teaches at the technical school where Tessa was educated. They originate in the Black Forest, which is both a physical region in Germany and the title of a concurrent solo exhibition I was working on. In the film, the Black Forest is both geographic and mythological—a site of industry and origin of fable. At its center is the Clock Museum and Technical School.
In Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture, time folds, space flattens, and perception is pushed to the edge of its own apparatus. 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 structuring and spatial assembly that is shaped by field and density. The center—whether of a body or the earth—is not fixed, but formed through time, force/pressure, and fluctuating environmental conditions—each operating as both material and program, responsive and shaping.
