“I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
Thou seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o’er.

Fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis;
Quae, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant.
OVID, Met. I. 39”

~Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (1849)

highwatermarks is an immersive video and audio installation that was envisioned, filmed, and edited during the artist’s year-long residency at the Brandywine River Museum of Art which focused on key aspects of the Brandywine Conservancy’s activities. The video and sound environment depicts the river and its people through four seasons, blending views from the Brandywine landscape with on-water shots filmed from a small boat constructed by the artist  at the museum.

The video is a micro-level investigation of environmental issues that affect rivers and streams throughout the world, a portrait of place – the Brandywine River – and an ethnographic portrait of the community who live in the region, use the river, and find themselves in it.

In our current moment of global ecological uncertainty and increasing evidence of the human hand in shaping nature and climate, I was interested in focusing on the Brandywine as a site that has been made and remade continually over successive epochs of human ingenuity and discovery, and through engineering, agriculture, manufacturing, and now tourism.  While a river like the Brandywine may appear to be a natural system, human beings are inextricably linked to that natural system – we might attribute this human hand to a history of environmental degradation.  Thoreau realized this in traveling on and writing about the rivers in Northern Massachusetts, and Hudson River School painters were depicting these very changes in their work.  At the same time, the current work of the Conservancy shows that through stewardship and organization, policy and community-building, we might also have a positive impact in preserving and conserving such fragile natural sites.

Sean Hanley (Cinematography),  Yoni Brook (Cinematography), Meryl O’Connor (Editing), Brian Hutchings (Color)

“We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as THEY take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as THEY see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as THEY shrink back; we find “shocking” what THEY find shocking.” ~ M.H.

“The shape is the object: at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape.” ~ M.F.

b. An open-source feature-length video composed of 24 5-minute parts, recorded by a single camera.

c. A Mini- DV tape is locked into the camera. The camera is mailed back and forth between hudson and nyc, in a call and response fashion. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to take part by borrowing the camera and recording a 5-minute video on the theme of ‘correspondence,’ this paper-based shot log will travel back and forth with the camera detailing time of day and location of the last shot to guide the start of the next scene.

See 120m for current location of the camera.

“My idea was to immerse myself in this maelstrom of images to establish its Geography.” ~ Chris Marker, Immemory

In 1639 a brook was built to divert water from the Charles to power mills on what was then called the East Brook.

The brook is a quiet, forgotten backwater (in some cases, even hidden – it runs in a culvert under the parking lot for the Pizzeria Uno in Dedham).

Echoes of the mills remain (Saw Mill Lane and Stone Mill Drive, which cross the brook). Centennial Dam now sits beside an apartment complex built out of a former mill on Stone Mill Drive.

The trees all clump together into some sort of treeness. The water… is it shallow? Is it water? Is it dried out? Give me a second and I’ll look up the weather. When are these images from? This is a memory of theriver. Made for passing by. Odd that the whole of it was made in a single take. When was that moment, when all was memorized? Is this the now-river or something else — older-river? It is hard to navigate from here. You can’t navigate a moment anyway. I’m trying to find my way through the cloud into the wilderness. Where is the dark matter we know exists? Are there any missing masses if you stop stopping to explain? Where is the way through the quote-unquote known to the still quote-unquote unknowable?

Can we click off the known layer and find ourselves only in the real thing?  Even a simulation of the real thing would be better than this.  We are training our eyes not to see beyond that which we know, that which has been written.  As if there was nothing else but that which had been written.