And All of Everything (2019-20)
At the end of July 2019, I defended my dissertation and completed my doctorate. Two days later, I filled my car with computers and drove to Vancouver Island with my dad to spend August there. On the way through interior British Columbia, I saw a waterfall high up a mountain cascading down the rock surface, eroding, flowing, cutting, and exploding out a mist. I spent the next month meditating on that image and made the first waterfall in the Kingdom of Illumination series. My meditation practice was developing, and I began to include walking and photographing as a meditative act. A friend of mine, Kyle Terrence, came for a week and stayed with me, and we drove to the west side of the island, near Port Renfrew, to an old-growth forest called Avatar's Grove. We spent the afternoon there, taking videos of its unimaginable beauty. I looked through the camera, controlled my breath, and looked-with the camera, attuning to its autofocus, depth of field, and limitations. I recorded the life on life on life of that forest. A sacred place.
In November 2019, I travelled to Los Angeles for a conference, to deliver a paper and be part of an art exhibition. At the end of it, I rented a car and drove into the desert, to Joshua Tree National Park. I spent two days in the park, using the same meditative, close looking camera style I practiced on the island. After hours of filming, I found my way to a beautiful expanse of cacti. They were like nothing I had ever seen. They looked like a congregation before God—before the sun. The sun was getting lower, and I watched it, meditated with it as it approached the mountain horizon. When it nearly touched the mountain, I began recording it. I looked through the viewfinder, holding the other eye shut, and tried to hold my body still. It was an amazing sensation to watch the sun set in that way. Feeling it coarse through my body and mind as I held as still as I could.
When I got home, I spent November thinking about Dreamtime, the night-shade of the world, the unconscious, mysticism, the surreal. I loved how the original And All of Everything was so demanding at night (at that time Jonathan Kawchuk hadn't put his score under it, and it was a silent film) but I wanted that to be a time to explore something new—a space of biblical storms and floods and all the symbols that fill our dreams and religions. I developed this new 25-minute film with Gary James Joynes' Broken Sound score under it, helping with the timing, slowing me down, keeping it sparse. It took three months of rendering to get it at its 4K resolution, and Joynes created a breathtaking original score for it. The sound denies climax, like there will be no climax with climate change, just a slow burn, attritional—slow violence. This is a monument, an archive of a site at risk of annihilation.
I'm waiting to get back to Vancouver Island this summer, back to Avatar's Grove, to make the 1-hour follow up to this film, Avatar's Dream. It will be a journey through the Dreamtime of an old-growth forest, a sacred place living in a different temporal scale, with no beginning or end, just life on life. Life expressing itself.