Excerpt of Codex Rundle (2024) – Looping 8K video triptych; running time: 03:30 per loop
CODEX RUNDLE is an ecological portrait of Mount Rundle. It is a film collage project that takes inspiration from an ancient type of manuscript known as a codex. In particular, it references codices that catalogued the world in encyclopedic detail. In some cases, these ancient scripts contain the only surviving information we have about extinct ecologies. In that spirit, CODEX RUNDLE is a letter to the future.
Mount Rundle is between the towns of Banff and Canmore in the Canadian Rockies. It is an oasis of wilderness surrounded by encroaching human activity and infrastructure.
CODEX RUNDLE is rooted in the tradition of Canadian landscape painting. It combines the idea of landscape as a scenic view with the action of cataloguing the flora and fauna hidden deep in that landscape. To achieve this, I have spent four summers scrambling up, down and through the various mountain environs to film visual details on all sides of Mount Rundle from the alpine summits down to the valley bottoms.
The objective is to create an intimate impression of the land that includes the animals, trees, flowers, birds, insects, rivers, weather, geology and everything else. The resulting art work is a tapestry woven from thousands of video clips. It presents landscape as a dynamic interconnected system rather than simply a picturesque scene.
The work will take the form of an interactive “altarpiece” loosely fashioned after Bosch’s renaissance masterwork ‘THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS’ as a way to associate landscape and nature with the idea of the sacred. A lenticular image of the Earth is displayed when the side panels closed. Viewers will be able to open the side panels to reveal the film collage of Mount Rundle. Visually, the process will be like zooming from outer space onto the surface of the planet.
The film collage of Mount Rundle is structured on a 24-hour cycle (one rotation of the Earth). This connects the ground beneath our feet with the cosmos above our heads. It is a glimpse at the finite nature of the land we live on.
