Into the Void
Anna Altman
At first glance, the red craggy landscapes of Lisa Mordhorst’s "In Between" series–pushing from above, pushing from below–resemble abstractions of Mars as relayed by the Hubble telescope. The processes by which Mordhorst and the telescope create their images are remarkably similar.
To capture an image of the Red Planet, scientists must take at least ten separate exposures. They assemble these snap shots, adjusting the images to account for the planet’s movement during and between exposures, into one color picture. The resulting image is sharp; it reveals information not previously visible to the public. But it is not an exact representation.
According to Mordhorst, "the more I read about how they got their images, the more I am assured it’s completely made up. They’re drawing from actual data… [such as] heat recordings" but the results not scientific copies; they are renderings. Mordhorst crafts her pieces, too–collating photographs of desert buttes and sharp, dry peaks, and digitally altering the images once they are combined. Each picture is a composite desert–one sharp terrain drives upwards, from the earth; the other falls downward, it’s rocky surface where the sky should be. The two lands masses do not touch, but compress the air, the white emptiness, the space between.
The aesthetic similarity between the "In Between" series and the Mars photographs was suggested to Mordhorst by a friend only after her series was completed. But the parallels in their process of creation reveals much of what Mordhorst’s describes as the limitations of photography. "We’ll receive those images and say, ‘That’s what Mars looks like.’ And it’s a decent representation, but it’s a guess." Mordhorst rejects the concept that any photograph can be viewed as true documentation: "The concept that photography is true is ridiculous to me. So I’m playing on that [in my own work]. I’m recreating totally different landscapes–which kind of works with how we’re making these fantasy words all over the place and accepting them as truth."
To capture the varied parts to each of these fused landscape, Mordhorst uses a method of photography known as "hip shooting," an inexact method that sounds as Western as her dramatic landscapes appear. "Still images are really important to me because I’m really asking people to look." Mordhorst is aware that this sensation of observing a landscape as it passes a moving vehicle is familiar to everyone. "We’re used to that movement of the landscape, which maybe is why I’m a little addicted to it…. It’s my investigation, my necessity for stopped time. Because I also come from this tradition, so I have to create a way for myself to deal with it as well."
Mordhorst snaps a series of photographs in quick succession out of her car window while she is driving without adjusting the light meter or focus lens before each shot. It is a techinique defined by its irregularity. Mordhorst is never entirely sure of what she has until she processes her film. Shooting at second intervals "sort of like [how] an animator would deal with imagery," Mordhorst is left with many images that offer only slightly altered perspectives of the same landscape. These are her building blocks. It is the "slight movement, the slight next step… how that changes" that interests Mordhorst and which she explores in this series: "It could be as small as a foot in space different vantage point and that’s it." These small discrepancies require us to take note of the landscape, take notice of her moments of "stopped time." We are conditioned to generalize away the details–a landscape is a landscape. Mordhorst makes us take pause, look closer.
Mordhorst challenges our tendency to fill in the spaces in between what we see with what we assume and what we expect. "We understand what a landscape is and allow our eyes to fill in that information and they do. We take that for granted more and more today, we all move so fast."
Aware of the public’s habituation to her subject matter, Mordhorst’s work includes strategies developed to facilitate the viewer’s careful consideration of and involvement in landscape images. The large size of Mordhorst’s photographs dwarf the viewer–they envelop your entire field of vision. The landscapes she pairs are never identical; she chooses them so they are just different enough to catch a careful eye, requiring us to look closer. In this way, Mordhorst invites us in her effort to "break down that landscape, rework it."
The red tint of the prints is another crucial tool to jolt the audience into attention. Although red was a color Mordhorst "just happened to stumble on," she chose it as the dominating hue for the "In Between" series. "The tones, the richness of it is really attractive to me–It’s earthy enough that it does relate to what exists" like clay, fire, and other organic elements in the landscape."
The "In Between" series strikes a strange balance–it remains faithful to traditional landscape elements while scrambling, altering them, and, physically, turning them upside down. Mordhorst describes this as "tricking the eye, bringing you further in."
The horizon is the traditional focal point in any landscape. It pulls our gaze, offers the possibility of what might exist beyond our scope; it offers a point of reference, of proportion. Mordhorst erases our horizon line by inclosing the sky within two horizons. The vestigial horizon is central to Mordhorst’s landscapes, physically and conceptually. She confuses our perception of location and orientation–where are these landscapes and where are we in relation to them? She draws our eyes to the empty space between, playing with our tendency to focus in on what’s missing. It’s what "that space in between is about, that nothingness," says Mordhorst. "It makes you look harder even though our first response is to say that it’s nothing."
The void that remains implies an opening: a way of breaking through the plane of the photograph, and the plane of the landscape. It expands the viewer’s ability to perceive the landscape beyond familiar expectations.
At the same time, the emptiness at the center can be viewed as negative space: as a lack rather than an expansion, created by a closing in rather than a pushing out. Enclosed by the lines of the landscape on top and bottom, the central white space can feel like a compressed void. Mordhorst’s argues that Westerners tend to view the vastness of the landscape as an emptiness while in other cultures, "it is the opposite of the way we in the West view that nothingness. It’s nothingness, it’s full," she explains.
In this instance, however, we are not mistaken to view the space as an absence. In order for this negative space to exist, Mordhorst must literally delete any information from the photographs. There exists a literal absence where she has removed a natural and integral part of the landscape to create a true negative space.
The tensions between fullness and emptiness, expansion and enclosure, are essential to each piece of the "In Between" series. Although Mordhorst uses this central space as "a tool to draw people in," she recognizes that it can do just the opposite. Alienation is "inevitable–that’s sort of the point in asking the viewer to ask themselves…. I think all of my work has that level of anxiety to it where there’s that constant push-pull, that undulation in your emotional space."
Mordhorst intends this fluctuating "push-pull" of emotions and questions to have a physical counterpart. The undulation is "not just your emotional space but where you are." She wants viewers "to take into consideration the environment that they’re standing in…. I want them to be aware of their own immediate surroundings… fall in and out [of the piece], understand where you are, what your space is, both on a large scale and immediately."
The most important thing for Mordhorst, however, is that the audience becomes actively involved in the piece. The experience should be a "personal, individual investigation. We all make art hopefully to have somebody take what they need, what they want from it. I don’t want to dictate." Mordhorst leaves plenty of room for personal reflection in her work. Indeed, the center of each piece is a space for us to enter and to fill with our own interpretations.
