Ariel C. Wilson, image courtesy of the artist

At the beginning of this century, webcams began to revolutionize the way we could experience the world: from our computer screens, at any given moment we could see what was happening at various points in the world. The view could be mundane or majestic, all depending on where someone bothered to mount their camera: a view of the Eiffel Tower, the ocean from a small fishing village in Mexico, a nest of falcons at the local library. Two decades later, the concept is now commonplace: everyone’s doorbell has the possibility to be a webcam. But there is still something magical about the process, at least for Salt Lake City artist Ariel C. Wilson.

Wilson, who has an MFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico and is currently a visiting professor at Weber State University, is a multifaceted artist who pushes the boundaries of how we perceive the world through photography and mixed media. She began investigating the possibilities of the webcam when she photographed the sunset being displayed by a webcam in Yosemite National Park, where her partner was living at the time.  “Webcams give me access to places that I have deep embodied connections to, but can’t always be in,” she says. Since then, she’s photographed the sunrise and sunset through numerous webcams, mostly located on public lands. “I’m fascinated by my tendency to watch, and try to capture, the sunrise or -set, through my screen rather than stepping outside to see it in person, where I am. … The sun is always rising somewhere, but not always where I am. Yet to watch a sunrise through a 13” laptop screen instead of sitting beneath the immeasurable sky feels so incredibly sad, compressed, and insufficient. Why do I do it?”

Wilson is trying to answer that question in her current project, in which she is collaborating with Matt Kowal, a New Mexico-based photographer and artist. Her studio is a testament to this exploration, equipped with several monitors displaying images from Big Bend National Park, Island in the Sky at Canyonlands, and Crescent Lake in Olympic National Park. Her collaborator has created what they are calling a “reverse webcam,” a web page that reworks the live images into a new format, essentially creating a continuous loop of still images from each webcam. Each monitor shows a different location, providing a broad visual experience that spans different time zones and geographical areas, though the scenes are chosen so they don’t include any prominent landmarks.

In addition to the “live webcams,” she is experimenting with other light-based and optically-based apparatuses that interact with the light of the space and the light coming from the monitors. “I have a one inch square solar panel attached to a circuit board that powers one LED light with a tiny amount of sun,” she explains. “I recently acquired a graduated, rectangular, neutral density filter which is essentially a small (just over 4” x 5”) glass rectangle that has a light-blocking film gradient on it. This filter is originally designed to be placed in front of a camera’s lens to darken the sky for photographers while keeping the foreground well exposed, often for sunsets specifically. I currently have a photographer’s magnifying loupe attached to the front of one monitor, and a scope on a tripod pointed at another. On the floor I have three sunrise-mimicking alarm clocks. I see themes of simulating, mediating, or re-presenting (with compression artifacts) daily cosmic events in my current curiosities.”

In a previous project, “Bad Moon Photos,” Wilson examined the failures of photography, specifically low-resolution cell phone photography, to capture vast visual entities like the moon. She sees the current, as yet untitled project as related, “with the reductive experience of viewing a sunrise or sunset through a low resolution webcam, striating the gradually shifting gradient of light, and slowing down our viewing to anywhere from sixty to four frames per hour. Most videos play at 30 – 60 frames per second. This act of looking is much slower, either a changing sequence of images or a monumentally-slow video, and requires a patience that I am not always used to exerting in contrast to the speed of my surrounding digital feeds. Regardless, the contending desire and compression of using photography to witness and fix a view of celestial occurrences (the full moon or a sunrise/sunset), feels very related to me.

In thinking of all her work, she talks of “peel[ing] apart the image from the referent (what the image depicts). Instead of looking through the frame of the photograph, I have tried to make the translative process of photograph visible like the brush strokes in a painting. This investigation has run parallel to my desire to question my physical perception and learned biases and assumptions. If I can see both the camera and my own constructed experience of vision, perhaps in time I can work to de-couple my own heavily learned reliance on vision for some kind of truth about the world around me.”

Wilson has exhibited work nationally and internationally including at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, 516 Arts, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Pollock Gallery, SRO Gallery, Image Ark Nepal, and in the Pingyao International Photography Festival. She was included as an emerging artist on Silver Eye’s 2023 Silver List and has received a Joan C. Edwards Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Arts award, a Beaumont Newhall Fellowship, and residencies from Vermont Studio Center and Bikalpa Art Center. Some results from her current experimentation with Matt Kowal will be on exhibit at Erosion Gallery, a 6″ x 6″ experimental gallery inside the studio of printmaker Andrew Rice.

from where the sun is setting, Thursday, May 30th from 7-9pm (Sunset at 8:52pm), Erosion Gallery, 126 W. Crystal Avenue, Salt Lake City, UT 84115

All images courtesy of the artist

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.