3D Animation, 2010
This is a 3-minute excerpt from a 24-minute looping projected video installation, meant for viewing in a gallery. This is a 3D animation created as a result of my residency at the St. Croix Watershed Research Station and the Science Center of Minnesota.
Logjam asks the viewer to contemplate the cyclical process of death and rebirth (in the full piece, the animation begins and ends with an empty riverbed), while also discovering the calming effect of chaos. In order to accomplish this, I designed the animation to be studied like a moving painting that is meant to appear simultaneously solemn and hypnotic.
A logjam is how a river communicates that it has lost its patience - that it has been pushed beyond its physical limitations as a source of life and power. It is a stopped moment in time - a point at which the river holds its breath in frustration before once again letting it out in a panicked frenzy of activity. But in the Logjam animation, that moment lasts forever, shifting back and forth repeatedly, between victory and defeat. By visually focusing on the historical relationship between the environment and the logging industry, my goal was to have the viewer question exactly what is truly dying in Logjam’s continuous symbiosis between humanity and nature.