steve roden
monochrome blue (a year of skies), 2002
color super 8 film transferred to video
silent

exhibitions: some reconstructions of wandering and inner space, santa barbara contemporary arts forum, CA, & a year of skies, gallery e/Static torino, italy, 2002

in june of 2001, i began the film project monochrome blue (a year of skies), where i shot 9 frames (or 1/2 second) of color super 8 film of the sky every day for one year. my intention was to create a simple record of the shifting colors of the sky over a one year period towards the creation of a kind of monochrome painting.

what i ended up with was a lot of activity on the surface of the film (dust, scratches, etc. as well as eventually splice tape), that became part of the foreground along with the sky colors. once i began to respond to this surface noise, i decided to edit out several frames that included very visible cloud structures. these images created a kind of instant recognition that killed any possibilities of abstraction and wandering.

this became the first project that i allowed myself to drift away from the predetermined structure of the work (this film will end up being 3285 frames long) in order to allow the piece to be what it felt like it wanted to be. perhaps the first moment of the discovery of one of my favorite sayings "i never want my works to be in the service of my ideas". through the simple act of eliminating 15 or 20 frames that would've anchored anyone's view of the work to the idea that sparked it; i felt i had freed the piece to exist on its own terms. a tiny moment of monumental importance in the trajectory of my work.

there are two 9 frame sequences of blackness, one shot on 9/11/2001, and one shot on a day that a good friend passed away. both days the camera pointed at the sky with my hand covering the lens.

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