Colorado Impression 12a & 12b
installation shot and colour negative
Notes:
For ages I'd been monitoring dozens of ski resort and traffic web-cameras in Colorado, searching for possible source material. Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of visual information, updated every few minutes, I decided to revisit the sites on particular dates or times of day. On the first anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks in New York, around the time of sunrise in Colorado, I found the image used for Colorado Impression 12a. This low resolution photo had a peculiar quality I'd been searching for: when turned upside down and the colours inverted, a plausible landscape mysteriously appeared. Uncannily, this new scene reminded me of video footage from Afghanistan, depicting the bombing of the Tora Bora mountains in the search for Bin Laden. A pine tree in the original image becomes a kind of missile trail in the sky; a clearing on the wooded hillside becomes a trail of smoke.
The two paintings took about five months each to paint from computer printouts. Given the weight of the subject matter, I was as faithful as possible to the original images, although with the flawed nature of oil paint – the fact it dries slightly darker – the paintings are imperfect inversions of each other.
Each painting cryptically contains the other. This relationship reflects the idea that these two landscapes, almost exactly 180 degrees opposite on the globe in terms of longitude, are politically bound together – that they are mutually dependent. When I showed them together for the first time in 2006, few viewers recognised their intimate relationship.