Under the Bridge

2005

Screen Shot 2020-04-18 at 10.26.53 AM.png

Shell inlay map viewed over scan of original map

Screen Shot 2020-04-18 at 10.27.07 AM.png

Screen Shot 2020-04-18 at 10.27.20 AM.png

Paired video still from each cabinet

Paired cabinets in Californian Madrone, Australian myrtle and shell, with video components. Each cabinet 44” x 34” x 28”.

Under the Bridge consists of two small, finely crafted, lidded cabinets standing opposite each other on tripods. Raising one or the other of their lids reveals and activates a small screen set deep into the cabinet body showing looped video footage of moving water. The footage was shot from the centers of the famous bridges of Sydney and San Francisco, but no part of the bridges or surrounding landscape appears in the frame. The waters are from my two ‘homes’ on either side of the Pacific Ocean - they are superficially similar yet fundamentally different.

The inlay in the top of each cabinet is a map of shoreline that each bridge spans oriented in the same way as the view of the water shown in the video. The maps were taken from the earliest Western maps made of those shorelines. Sydney’s shoreline was mapped by John Hunter as the first European colony was established in 1788 . George Vancouver mapped what would become known as the Golden Gate in 1798. The two distant shores were apprehended for the first time by Western explorers only 10 years apart. Both maps essentially represent a first look at the new shoreline. Our first attempts to understand and incorporate a new world into the old.