As I went over the water, the water went over me

As I went over the water, the water went over me is inspired by the mysterious and the abstract, of what could be if your mind was left to wander. An imagined river beast emerges from the depths of the water through Gillett Bridge in Grand Rapids, MI, coming to rest partially submerged in the concrete and bricks. A large mouth exposes the teeth and glowing inner belly–during darker hours the "beast" glows largely from the mouth and nore delicately from each of the perforations and the slits between the scales. Using truss construction methods traditionally used in home building, the project draws on the mythological notion of living inside a whale or sea creature and imagery of children's picture books.

Selected and funded as a Featured Public Art project for Art Prize 2016 in Grand Rapids, MI.

Ghost Barn

Ghost Barn is based on the lines and architectural forms of rural Wisconsin barns and is dependent on natural wind currents to animate its large, billowing, fabric shape. We imagine this project as an architectural fragment of the memories and histories of this place and encourage visitors to enter the project.

Funded by the Wormfarm Institute. Created for the 2015 Fermentation Fest in Reedsburg, WI.

Silk Bloom

Silk Bloom is a series of sculptural forms based on the geometries and undulations of a flower bouquet and the graphic patterns of jockey silks, commissioned in celebration of the 2015 Breeder's Cup. The forms bend, wrap and fold in a similar language to paper origami construction methods. The vivid patterning is also meant to be evocative of the wayfinding symbols of trails and roadways and bold enough to stand out in the urban landscape and be noticed, pondered and remembered by car travelers en route to the races.

Fabrication by Rash, LLC.

Funded by LexArts and the City of Lexington.

Indigo Mood

Indigo Mood is composed of five sinewy forms that depend upon wind and human interaction for their movement and composition. We are interested in the juxtaposition of the slender yarn forms weighed down by the heaviness of the rocks and the potential for large and small movement. We were motivated by ideas of wind and water currents, erosion and geomorphology and wanted to design a projethat makes natural movements–as well as human interactivity–visible.

Funded by Primary Colours and the Indianapolis Art Center.

Tentrahedron

One of the most visually compelling qualities of the Bonnaroo experience is the tent city. In our initial thinking about this project we were continuously drawn to the images of the camping areas - the density of tents, the vibrant colors, the diversity and haphazardness of angled forms. Our project uses both an old-fashioned, traditional tent material (canvas) and a common, modern tent material (ripstop nylon) in an inverted canopy of tent-like forms. The intense, direct light from the skylight adds a continuous day glow to the materials (just as one experiences within a tent or under a tarp while camping). We hope that the Nashville airport traveller (destined for Bonnaroo or elsewhere)–through either a distant glimpse of the brightly illuminated forms or by walking directly underneath–will feel the intensity of the geometries and colors and be reminded of their own camping experiences (tent mornings with the early, warm sun, lazy dozing afternoon naps, late night conversations lit by flashlight).

Funded by the Bonnaroo Works Fund, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, Arts at the Airport

Shadow Studies

A series of digital image collages based on the shadow patterns created by our project Balancing Ground.

Give me a setting sun

Give me a setting sun, installed on a bus platform at Union Depot, is a visual meditation on the experience of waiting. What does it mean to wait? What kinds of emotions, remembrances and daydreams fill in the cracks of our 'captive' time? Asynchronous video streams are projected on a linear sequence of semi-transparent scrims; the result is a physical intermingling that invites interaction from the viewer–he/she can (and are encouraged to) literally walk through the work and affect the image.

Funded by Northern Lights.mn

Balancing Ground

A skeletal wooden structure houses six rows of six-foot-long pairs of wood benches and a twelve-foot-long playground-style teeter-totter. This dynamic see-saw (driven by individual Arduino processors and accelerometers) allows people to play with physical balance and also to hear and to reflect on certain words and phrases that are evocative of balance–audio files are triggered as people go up and down, evoking a dialogue between the two sides. Inside the space, directional speakers play longer fragments of conversations and interviews about balance and the absence of it, triggered by motion sensors.

The installation gently reacts to the natural light transitions of the day through the lengthening and shortening of the structure's many shadows, accentuated by the structure's placement on the plaza. A canopy of prismatic material and reflective fragments is strung between the rafters, casting bits of color and shadow down to the seating area below. The structure, proportions and fractured light suggest a sacred space deconstructed to its most elemental architectural components.

As the sun sets, theatrical lights illuminate the structure and the reflective materials of the canopy above, transforming the structure into an enlivened environment and an inverted silhouette of the intricate overhead patterns and shapes.

Balancing Ground is the winner of the 2014 Creative City Challenge in Minneapolis. The Creative City Challenge is a collaboration between The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC), the Culture and Creative Economy Program of the City of Minneapolis and Northern Lights.mn.

I Am Waiting

This video collage for the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center Marquee is a visual representation of the rhythm and patterns of urban circulation. The intersections of movement highlight the shifting perspectives of color, speed, and texture.

Funded by Boston Cyber Arts

Ordinary Human Unhappiness
Installation and exhibit of video projection projects exploring the relationships between time-based portrait, physical space, and cinematic narrative conventions.

Close Your Eyes, Drive As Fast As You Can
In traditional cinematic storytelling, voiceover narration is often used to fill in the gaps of the narrative, to offer information to the viewer or audience in a direct, expositional manner. When combined with the image, voiceover narration allows the viewer to make connections and affinities between what they are seeing and hearing. A story is created in the mind of the viewer, whether concrete, abstract, or indecipherable.

By intermingling the image, physically, through transparent material, and by randomizing the sequence of the voiceover narration and having overlap of both the content and the playback, the device of narration is re-contextualized. In using stylized black and white portraits as the image component, the viewer is left to determine what connections to make between the video, the audio, and its representation in physical space.

Nightingale
There's a comfort in the collective ritual, of the changing of one's appearance. When one is wearing a costume, one can pretend to be another and revel in this new identity. If one were to be in a costume at any other time of the year, or by oneself, the costume takes on an isolating characteristic. It becomes perverse, or sad, or strange, or some mixture of all three.

:29
Cinematic narrative devices drive filmed entertainment. In Hollywood action films, the storytelling device of the countdown is often used to create tension. Whether it's the timer of a bomb that is about to go off, or a finite period of time in which a character needs to complete a task, the countdown creates unease in the audience by referencing time and its fleetingness. In de-contextualizing the timer or countdown itself, and removing any tangible meaning of its implications, the viewer is presented with a cinematic device without a narrative to forward.

Establishing Shot

With a series of "establishing shots" at the intersection of Snelling Avenue and University Avenue, this project aims to re-imagine "the busiest intersection in St. Paul, Minnesota" and to capture the subtle beauty of this active, urban landscape. As a web-based visual experience, this project is accessible to anyone with an internet connection and provides the viewer the opportunity to encounter the imagery of this physical space through four different conditions (dawn, midday, dusk and night).

Funded by Irrigate Arts, Springboard for the Arts

establishingshotstpaul.com

Figurants

An interactive narrative video experience, comprised of looped video and using a DVD menu system as an interface. The perceiver navigates the spaces by clicking on theoretically logically placed invisible buttons.

Spamstream

An interactive installation using blog comment spam as a content source, exploring the relationship between what we read, see and hear on the internet. Words and phrases are selected from comment spam, spoken aloud, and recorded as audio files. When pressed, a wireless button plays a random audio file, which has a visual correspondence on a large projection in the form of an image pulled from Google image search, based on one of seven categories (Drugs, Religion, Sex, Violence, Money, Entertainment, and Advertising). The image is displayed at a random position in the collage and passed through one of ten randomly chosen image filters. The result is an interactive collage of internet imagery that is never the same twice, at once mysterious and familiar.

Collaboration with Matt Quesada

Evoking Complexities

A study of the communication of complex metaphysical concepts and narrative structure through the visual imagery of set design.

We are a sculptor/installation artist and an interactive new media artist. As collaborators, our work often explores the relationship between urban conditions and site-specific spatial experiences. Our combined experience in architecture, public art and digital technologies provides us with a skill set to create work in a wide variety of forms, from large-scale structures to interactive video and audio installations, to complex fabric sculptures. Regardless of the form, we're interested in creating experiences that assimilate specific site qualities, materials and technology into a meaningful physical experience, both conceptually and formally.

Recent and current work includes: Silk Bloom (A collection of folded steel flower forms wrapped with the graphic patterns of jockey silks installed at three sites in Lexington, KY), Ghost Barn (a large fabric structure based on the architectural forms of rural Wisconsin barns), Indigo Mood (an installation in the sculpture garden at the Indianapolis Art Center), Balancing Ground, a large interactive structure in Minneapolis, MN that combined a skeletal wooden structure with complex shadow patterns and dynamic audio triggered by both human movement through the space and by play on an interactive see-saw, Tentrahedron a large, suspended fabric sculpture for the Bonnaroo music festival and the Nashville International Airport, Give Me a Setting Sun (an installation of fabric, video and audio on a bus platform at Union Depot in St. Paul, MN), I Am Waiting (a digital video collage based on the moving patterns of subway circulation in Boston, MA), and Establishing Shot (a time-based web experience visually documenting the busiest intersection in St. Paul. MN).

We try to study, imagine and create spatial environments as experiential compositions with an understanding of the implications for human reactions. Every space makes you feel something; as artists of that experience we try to use specific elements and their arrangement to evoke particular emotions.

Selected Exhibitions:

Fermentation Fest, Farm / Art DTour, Reedsburg,WI 2015
Installation Nation, Indianapolis Art Center, 2015
Walk-in Cinema, Saint Paul, MN, 2014
Northern Spark Festival, Minneapolis, MN, 2014
MSU, Claypool-Young Gallery, 2014, 2015
Northern Spark Festival, Saint Paul, MN, 2013
The Experience of Dynamic Media, Mazmanian Gallery, 2012
Ordinary Human Unhappiness, Doran Gallery, 2011
Media Luscious, DMI Group Show, Pozen Center, 2011
Provocative Objects, DMI Group Show, Doran Gallery, 2010
Jan Kubasiewicz exhibit, Warsaw, Poland, 2010



Grants and Commissions:

LexArts and the City of Lexington, 2015
Wormfarm Institute, 2015
Installation Nation, Primary Colors, 2015
Bonnaroo/Arts at the Airport, Nashville Airport, 2015
Creative Production Grant, Morehead State University, 2014
Creative City Challenge, 2014
Northern Spark, 2013
Irrigate, Springboard for the Arts, 2013
Boston CyberArts, 2012

SARAH WEST
CHRISTOPHER FIELD

EMAIL: HELLO@WFIELDWORKSHOP DOT COM