Calendar (2007) by Lisa Young
New work made for New Climates
During the calendar year 2001, I took a photograph of the sky each morning when I awoke. The resulting 365 photographs softly fade into one another, collapsing 12 months of time into a 12 minute video. The subtle relationships between the varied blue skies (some with clouds, others depicting an occasional airplane) are created both by a predetermined structure (the calendar) and elements of chance (changing weather conditions).
– Lisa Young
Calendar, by Lisa Young, presents an image of our climate for each day of one year, which have been strung together to form a video slideshow produced for this exhibition. Through this process-based experiment, she draws our attention to the ways in which our impressions of the natural world have been artificially structured by a timekeeping regime. In fact, climate “change” as we experience it is filtered through the larger concepts of temporality and chronology. How does natural, geologic or cosmic time synchronize or desynchronize with culturally constructed time? How should one monitor, record and preserve images of the ephemeral climate? Besides being a diligent record of a year in atmospheric shifts, Calendar is also reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s Sky TV (1966) in that it produces a sublime effect through its seemingly endless display of minimal skyscapes.
