A Photographic Exploration into the Nature of Time, Light, Space and Gravity
I am fascinated by the concept of time. I can measure it, account for it in an experiment in the lab, and live my life in it, but I still don’t know what it is, exactly.
We are all aware of the great pioneering time and motion studies done by practitioners such as Eadweard Muybridge, Harold “Doc” Edgerton and even the experimental work of Bernice Abbott done during the late 1950s at MIT. That work investigate motion with image capture intervals ranging from 100 nanoseconds (the time of the pulse of a fast strobe) to the several seconds it takes for a horse to trot in front of a reference grid. In fact, most contemporary photographers work somewhere within that range. What would happen then, if we decided to work outside of that range? What would happen if we picked an image capture interval of not seconds, but weeks?
This conceptual work in progress, will investigate the physical phenomena of still and moving objects in space over time.
My process is as follows:
1) Compose and photograph a still life.
2) Crop a subset of the image and send it to a painting factory in China.
3) Wait for an anonymous artist in China to complete an actual oil painting of the cropped section, and send it to me in the mail.
4) Reinsert the painting into the original setup and re-photograph.
As with previous work, I’m interested in issues relating to perspective. I’m interested in the tensions expressed in the comparison between reality vs. representation. I’m interested in what happens when I collaborate with another artist that has no idea that they are involved in a collaboration, and I’m interested in seeing and expressing subtle changes over time that we might otherwise take for granted.
John Chervinsky is a self-taught photographer and an engineer working in the field of applied physics. Since it first opened at the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2005, his “Experiment in Perspective” series has been traveling the country including solo exhibits at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Art Gallery, Batavia IL, Michael Mazzeo Gallery, NYC and Blue Sky Gallery, Portland OR. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Art, Portland OR; and Fidelity Investments Collection. Chervinsky spent eighteen years running a particle accelerator at Harvard University and has collaborated with museums, using accelerator technology in the analysis of art. He currently works for Harvard’s Rowland Institute for Science, originally founded by Polaroid’s Edwin H. Land.
