when the walls disappear
When the Walls Disappear consists of three triptychs in Villard Hall at the University of Oregon, a building that was constructed in 1886 and is a national historic landmark. The three artworks depict images of forests in Oregon’s Coast Range, the Cascades, and in Oregon’s high desert. The trees pictured in each work are comparable in age or older than Villard Hall, providing a comparative timeline between the history of the building and the time that is embodied in the forests and landscapes around the state.
The timeline of Villard Hall’s 19th century construction and 21st century renovation is echoed in the process used to create the images for this project. The forested landscape images were created by using pinhole photography, a process first described in 1856. However, to create images large enough to be architecturally scaled, each artwork is a composite image of 40 – 60 individual digital pinhole photographs that were stitched together using 21st century software. Each of the individual pinhole images used in this project were taken with 10-20 second exposures, meaning that each large-scale composite image is comprised of multiple hours of time in each given location.
On each triptych of When the Walls Disappear there is also a faint transparent image overlaying the forest landscapes. On the first-floor triptychs it is an image of a timber framed wall in Villard Hall that was exposed during construction. On the second-floor triptych it is the textured surface of a brick wall that lies behind the now sheet rocked wall the artwork is on. These ghostly transparent overlays are meant to show elements of the historic building that are now unseen.
The framing for the project was entirely milled from Douglas Fir beams used in the original construction of Villard Hall in 1886 but removed and salvaged during renovation. Based on the grain of the timbers, the wood was most likely milled from trees similar in size to those pictured in the composite pinhole photographs of the artworks.