| At one point I asked myself, if the human body is 90-percent water, then what makes up the other ten percent? This question started me photographing people I knew in stages of submerging in and out of water. I’ve often used my friends as models in my experiments, so they are cautious when I make any request for them to participate in one of my art projects. I even have an exhibition of this work, reconstructed as photo-based images, printed larger-than-life scale by thermal transfer into veil scrims. The veil material I work with has a sheen to it that acts like water tension or refraction on its surface, and the veil moving slightly on a wall when a person passes near it, gives another presence that a viewer might take more time to look at out of the corner of an eye. |  |
Derek Michael Besant
At one point I asked myself, if the human body is 90-percent water, then what makes up the other ten percent? This question started me photographing people I knew in stages of submerging in and out of water. I’ve often used my friends as models in my experiments, so they are cautious when I make any request for them to participate in one of my art projects. I even have an exhibition of this work, reconstructed as photo-based images, printed larger-than-life scale by thermal transfer into veil scrims. The veil material I work with has a sheen to it that acts like water tension or refraction on its surface, and the veil moving slightly on a wall when a person passes near it, gives another presence that a viewer might take more time to look at out of the corner of an eye.
Water. Something that we can drink, bathe in, or swim through. The element that freezes solid, falls through our fingers like sand, or is sometimes used to baptize the faithful. I have always been drawn to the fact that it can obliterate one’s vision or clarify the suspension of a body, like floating in air in slow motion. It is akin to a lens of sorts. Something to look through…
I read somewhere that British filmmaker Peter Greenaway always mentioned that the minute one discusses water, there is the possibility of drowning. And that has surfaced as a discussion every time I exhibit a full exhibition of this work in a museum. But the other relationships arise as far as the Pre-Raphaelite painters’ obsessions with classical themes, such as Ophelia. I think there will always be lines drawn between similar subjects, themes crossed among the trodden route, and attempts to define water in some rituals that deal with cleansing, healing, or washing away of something to oblivion. In my case, I tend to follow an idea that takes me to new ways of looking at things I thought I knew about.
I learned long ago, that work inside a gallery or museum was quite something else when you attempted to integrate it into the reality of urban settings. So, I started observing how signage functioned outdoors. This led me to the billboard industry, where I still do much of my research. New technologies have yielded incredible materials and ways to build work for settings where they operate differently. For instance, I can plan a series of images of people underwater that arrive on construction site scaffolds for a week or less. Images 30 feet by 30 feet across a building façade not only create an opportunity to consider scale, materials, and methods, but also how imagery reads as art rather than advertising.
One of my upcoming projects with water as subject matter will involve installing 100 images of submerged people that wrap onto buses and subway trains, like an outdoor museum exhibition in motion around a city. The technology for this is changing as rapidly as computer programs do, so I wait to output imagery until the last moment, to capitalize on the latest applications. The audience captured by this act is much larger than the audience who would normally see my work in a museum space. There is also the surprise encounter in the traffic. Watch the bus next time. It might be one of my works going by.
