ADAM HERMANS '07 ARTIST'S STATEMENT In Wildness is the Preservation of the World Awarded the Schupf Senior Art Prize, 2007 While visiting my grandparents and reveling in avian encounters in south-western Florida this past winter, I had the opportunity to hear the state's "photographer laureate," John Moran, speak. Though awed by Moran's photographs of Florida's natural beauty, it was his commentary that I found piquant—and disconcerting. Moran addressed the theme "imagine Florida four hundred years ago, or even a hundred…" and he aimed to capture this idea in his pictures. His photographs were successful: sweeping vistas of everglade prairies, verdant mangrove swamps, towering cypress bayous, pristine island beaches. But while he showed the pictures he spoke of how all this land was threatened: if he had panned over in one photograph, the view would have included a parking lot and boat ramp; that a cypress swamp shown in another had become a strip mall; that a road now connected a group of islands. Yet his photographs did not address those changes. It seemed that Moran, an older man, was able to make work solely about the natural beauty of his home. Meanwhile I, a bit younger, find this intersection of humans and nature troubling and provocative. I share Moran's taste for immaculate environments. I have a Romantic notion of nature as sublime but I'm learning to rethink exactly what nature means (particularly from the field of eco-criticism), and I feel a responsibility to address this new understanding. I am discovering my flawed understanding of nature as it is couched in Western notions and at times almost mirroring a monotheistic deity. I realize that humans are natural. My environmentalist leanings have been turned upside down by studying global environmental justice. My optimism for sustainable development is tempered by deep ecology. I am trying to understand each of my effects on the environment, from the impact of the roads I take to get to the wilderness I treasure, to basics such as turning on a light. I am interested in people's interactions with the landscape and how those relationships—climbing, farming, surfing, fishing, conserving, hunting, developing— compare and contrast. The intersection of natural and human environments (such as birds on power lines) intrigues me. I want to discover wilderness in my backyard and to be able to recognize the sublime in nature anywhere and everywhere. As Thoreau's observation (in Walking, 1862, from which the title is taken) implies, maintaining and appreciating the wild in the world—be it a deer at the doorstep, trespassing turkeys, or a warbler on the windowsill—remains of paramount importance. Video is a medium able to capture and express both this wildness and that which threatens it. It allows for the viewer to take time to look and listen, and thus to become engulfed in the atmosphere of the environment. Though I only discovered them as I finished my piece, my work is very much in the vein of Larry Gottheim and Peter Hutton. Like both of those artists, I am interested in looking at familiar places: many of these shots were recorded on my daily bike ride to class, from my back porch, or during walks in the woods across the street. I feel a kinship to Hutton's practice of just collecting images and then allowing them to shape the film. This film is simply about stepping back and looking. Motion pictures are steeped in the study and cultural construction of nature. From the beginnings of pre-cinema with Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of the West and a running horse (1878), to the dazzling leaves in the Lumière Brothers' Les repas de bébé (1895) and the early landscape films (extended from the Hudson River school of painting) of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, to the continued importance of landscape in contemporary avant-garde films by James Benning, Bill Viola, and Sharon Lockheart, the environment has been an important and consistent subject for filmmakers. My interest continues this tradition.

The Picker Art Gallery Website consisting of all photos, images, text and entire contents may not be reprinted or reproduced without written consent of the Picker Art Gallery. Copyright 2008