Filed under: Plus 3 Ferris Wheels
The Isthmus of Kansas, 2007
1:13 exceprt, Full Running Time: 8:06 mins
Christopher Cassidy – Greensboro North Carolina
The Isthmus of Kansas is a video completed in the spring of 2007. In this short work, I have striven for a simple formal clarity, while continuing to pursue my interest in landscape, geography and the viewer’s point-of-view. Original footage taken from locations high above the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines is combined in one nearly symmetrical image. It was the idea of the cross-continental call and response of the white lines of breaking surf that originally inspired me to create this work, which I think of as existing in a gallery space almost like an animated formalist painting, lines and shapes constantly shifting to redefine the simple geometry of the image. In this work, my strong desire is to create an impossible vision that unites these two simultaneous natural events, the contact between oceans and land separated by 2500 miles of intervening country. I was aware from an early stage that there were darker readings to the video, with its visualization of an American landmass reduced by rising sea levels to a bare strip of sand, and this allusion led me to the title.
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Plus 3 Ferris Wheels 