Look and See

http://polaroid41.com/look-and-see/

Monday, June 14th, 2021 - 6:49pm.

In March 2017, I went on a girls weekend in London. We stayed at the fabulous ACE hotel in Shoreditch and spent the majority of the weekend laughing, dancing, taking selfies in the lift, having brunch and sipping cocktails. (Ask Helena about the espresso martinis….) Amidst our girly fun, we did take a break for some culture: we had tickets to the David Hockney exhibit at the Tate. The exhibit, featuring sixty years of work by the artist, was one of the Tate’s most popular exhibits ever.

The six decade retrospective was organized as a chronological overview tracing his first public work as a student, his iconic bright colors and LA swimming pools in the 60s and 70s, his contributions to the pop art movement, his work with cubism and experimentation with photographic collages, up to recent digital and video pieces. The sheer volume and variety of work was inspiring.

Near the end of the visit, I wandered into a large dark room housing an immersive installation piece called “The Four Seasons - Woldgate Woods.” On the walls of this dark room were four large panels, each composed of nine high-definition video screens, thirty-six screens in all. To create the piece, a car rigged with nine video cameras was driven slowly down the same road in Woldgate Woods in each of the four seasons. The cameras, which were each zoomed in or further out and set at slightly different angles, all captured an identical trip down a country road in spring, summer, fall, winter.

The concept is simple, but the result is mesmerizing. It felt like I was swimming inside one of Hockney’s photo collages. A moving mosaic everywhere I looked. The wooded road he filmed is...a road. Nothing more. It’s there, in Yorkshire. You could go drive down it, thousands of people have. In fact, Hockney himself has probably driven it hundreds of times because, as I recall, the road lead to his mother’s house. How often do the roads we know well become invisible to us? Yet for Hockney the road was not only visible but in creating this piece, he allows us to see it with his eyes. Turning slowly and looking around me: spring, summer, fall, winter, the gentle journey down the country road, the acute sensation of time passing and the thought, “I am seeing this with David Hockney’s eyes,” moved me to tears. For a moment, I felt uniquely invited to see the world as he sees it, a mosaic of color and movement.

Last weekend in Paris, I was with the same group of girlfriends that I was with on that London trip. I feel deeply connected to these women, we get along so well, and even though I live in Toulouse now, when I go up to see them it’s always like we haven’t skipped a beat. We played old school Time’s Up on Saturday night, where we each came up with 8 words to put in a bowl that we would then have to describe and act out in the different rounds of the game. We’re so in sync that we ended up having multiples as we came up with the same words and phrases to put in the bowl to begin with. After a comical (and competitive!) Time’s Up we got to talking about a Facebook post made by another friend of mine who is a life coach. My coach friend prompted: ‘If you keep doing what you are doing today every day, in five years, are going to have more of what you want or less of what you want?’ I was totally surprised that we all had very different perspectives on the post. One of my friends had an absolutely allergic reaction to the ‘five years’ part...she kept saying, “How do I know what I am going to want in five years?! I don’t know what I want in five years! I don’t want to know! Not knowing is the SPICE OF LIFE!!”

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The complete 'polaroid' - text, minicast and polaroid photo - available at: http://polaroid41.com/look-and-see/