The day was Saturday, two days before I was flying out of Phoenix. It was a day we had meticulously set aside, to drive by the famous Apache Scenic Trail around Phoenix. I had read some of the most amazing stories about the trail and was all excited at the prospect of getting a first hand experience on the beauty and might behind this gorgeous slice of road trip – known to take you straight into the heart of the desert, through looming mountains, beautifully eroded canyons and breathtaking lakes!
But as luck would have it, the weather turned nasty that morning and soon, it started raining. The trail was supposed to be quite steep and winding, so it was dangerous to go there in bad weather. Plus, I hate to hurry things up while on a road trip, so we didn't want to take any chance to just drive by the points of interest, without actually stopping and letting the beauty sink in – only because it was raining. So, plan A was quickly shifted to plan B – road trip for tomorrow, something else for today.
What else, was an interesting question indeed! We spend a couple of hours (yeah, hours!!) trying to figure out what we could do and finally decided on checking out Scottsdale, better known as the city of the rich and the famous.
A suggested the whole day at one of the many famous golf and spa resorts at Scottsdale - which was indeed the golf mecca of the southwest. My scheming mind, ofcourse had other plans ;-) There was no way I was going to let him spend the whole day playing golf and the evening getting massaged! So, I subtly reminded him that other than being a golf mecca, Scottsdale was also, the art oasis of the Valley of the Sun. Well, subtle gave room to persistent :) and soon enough we were driving down towards the Scottsdale downtown museum of contemporary art.....
Three exhibitions struck my attention the moment we stepped in. The first was called Strangely Familiar: an international exhibition, highlighting the role of design in everyday living, that incidently also happened to be one of the top 40 exhibitions worldwide at that time. The second, was Street Credibility, work of the photographer Diane Arbus – and her attempt to blend in casual street photography with professional studio portraiture over the course of her lifetime, and last but not the least, was Sandglass – an exhibition of the desert vistas by Russian artists Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky.
Although the engineer in me, was more interested in checking out the design work first, there was something vaguely intriguing about the word Sandglass which led my steps unknowingly, into the least famous of the all the three exhibitions! We had absolutely no idea what we were getting into, when we mechanically followed the narrow alley, down into the room saying - Sandglass.....
What I saw when I entered the room, was something so ordinary that my first reaction was quite a bit of surprise! On the wall in front of me, was a huge video installation. Two screens, around 30 feet total, in length, were placed side by side. Each of them was projecting still, black and white snapshots, of identical desert landscapes – just a curved, worn-out road, extending from the left bottom of the screen to the right top, a few peaked mountains visible at the back and a group of flat mountains with striations visible on the left. There was absolutely no difference in the two screens at all.....
...Sandglass - 1 and 2.... www.smoca.org
I turned my attention away from the screen towards the room, which was completely dark except for two silhouettes at a distance – one person sitting besides the bench at the far end of the room, staring onto the screen and a second, standing on the side, looking a little disinterested. The second person I think, had entered just moments before us, and was visibly disappointed in what he saw. So by the time we moved closer to the bench, he had already left the room. One thing that I’ve learnt in whatever little appreciation I have for art, is to be patient with it and let it talk to you, rather than making hurried judgements way too soon - so, I decided to stick around a little while longer.......
So, there we were - just three people in the huge room - me, A and the third observer. I settled down on the lone bench, in front of the screen and my eyes slowly adjusted themselves to the darkness around me. I gave a second, more determined look onto the two screens in front of me and the two things that I noticed this time around were painstakingly beautiful. For one, the two snapshots were not quite identical and two, they were not quite stationary!!!
As I bore my eyes deeper onto the screen, I noticed that the image on the left was moving very slowly to the right and the one on the right was moving very slowly to the left! The motion was so slow that it was barely perceptible…The frames were casually showing different angles of the same landscape, and at the same time slowly trying to move towards each other, converging, I think, to a single snapshot. What was amazing about the entire projection, was how it explored the subtle nuances of the so chosen landscape – almost every iota of the meandering uphill road in the front, each and every grain of sand on the side of the road and every single striation etched on the mountains in view – was thrown naked in front of my eyes.....so ordinary, yet so exquisite!
The whole image had a kinda feel-good effect on me, some sort of a weird contentment, at letting the time slip by, so very slowly in front of my eyes – while watching one of nature’s precious hidden treasures. I can almost swear that I didn’t notice the 40 minutes or so, we spend, just watching the screen go by - before A reminded me that we had yet to see the rest of the exhibitions…
I wanted to continue the rest of the story - on how intellectually stimulating the design exhibition was or how fascinating some of Diane’s work were – but you know what, compared to Sandglass, I think, all that fell way behind.
The simplicity, in the depth of Sandglass, was indeed unmistakable and uncomparable....
