Darius Kinsey: Clear Cut
2023-2024
Black-and-white film projection, score of cello and voice, 6 min.
Darius Kinsey: Clear Cut is a six-minute film projection showing various still photographs of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest taken by the early-twentieth-century photographer Darius Kinsey (1869-1945). Working with a large-format camera in the old-growth forests of western Washington state, Kinsey captured both the magnitude of the trees and the scale of the clear-cut deforestation. At a time when the ecological consequences of harvesting old-growth trees were largely ignored, the loggers in Kinsey’s photographs stand proudly over the mammoth trees they have felled, like hunters posing alongside their trophy kills. The monumental feats that they have accomplished animate their gazes in remarkably assured compositions, which feel equally celebratory and elegiac. The projection is accompanied by an unsettling musical score composed by David Lang and performed by cellist and vocalist Maya Beiser. The intense tempo of the music invokes the tragic razing of the ancient trees.
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Old Growth images / installation images / Forest Waves film / Darius Kinsey: Clear Cut / book