BACO
still, not still
In one of our back and forth exchanges, Jon sent me a photograph that he took in a hotel in Wakayama, Japan. “The room only had one little window and it opened to a 1 foot gap between my hotel and the adjacent building,” he said, “so the decorator installed a lightbox with a beautiful beach and mountain scene… it felt like a cheesy but effective workaround.” Then he asked, “if you had to spend 2 weeks in a room with no windows, what would your lightbox scene be?”
Two images came to mind, almost immediately. The first was a photograph of Takakkaw Falls — which has always felt like a powerful, spiritual place to me. But it was the second image, that I knew was the one I’d want to have in that room with me.
still, not still is a composite of two images that I’ve worked with separately, in the past — a photograph of glacial ice that I took at Athabasca Glacier and an old photograph from the Meiji Era, of a young woman riding a stuffed crane. In response to Jon’s question, I saw these images in my mind as one … as a lingering … as something still in me, unfinished … and I found myself wondering, if I closed my eyes, would a story come to the page or off my tongue, from this still, not still image? Maybe, when falling asleep in that room with this image, some bits of the story might surface from the dreams of night.
JON
“Hi Baco, I liked what you were saying about adaptable spaces, and the imperative to be responsive to changing situations. I think a lot about this sort of thing when it comes to our JC ancestors having to uproot and build new lives, reinvent themselves with new jobs, communities, civic identities.
This video shows a rough 3D scan of my home workspace. I was setting up a 3D scanner at Christmastime and this was a test… it is terribly inaccurate but aesthetically I enjoy how it looks. Depending on my frame of mind it looks either like a scene of destruction, or alternatively a space that is malleable like putty, able to be reconfigured into something new as needed.”