Water Falls Once

Raffaella Cortese, in collaboration with MATTA, is pleased to present Water Falls Once, a solo exhibition by Eloise Hess at the gallery’s space in Albisola Superiore.

The installation consists of a projection of 80 slides drawn from four rolls of 35 mm colour negatives. The photographs depict Moss Glen Falls, a waterfall in northern Vermont near the artist’s family home. Taken one after another from a fixed position facing the waterfall, the photographs are nearly identical. The horizontal negatives were cut into vertical strips and mounted into slides without following the original divisions between frames, so that each slide contains a different fraction of the photograph. They include the blank spaces between the photographs and the long flares at the beginnings and ends of the rolls of film. The sprockets, imprinted information, and material traces become part of the fragmentary landscape.

The work places the continuous and changing nature of experience in tension with the limited frame through which it is captured, the ceaseless flow of the waterfall in resistance to the attempt to retain the isolated instant and representative image. Projected in a loop through a carousel slide projector, the slides turn in a repetitive, mechanical, and sonic cycle, each appearing briefly before giving way to the next. The sequence progresses in the ongoing slippage between return and disappearance.

The projection falls onto lightweight paper hanging at the centre of the space. Sensitive to the movement of the air and bodies, the receptive surface gently drifts, offering the image unsettled ground. When the gallery is closed, the projection remains visible through the window door like a distant apparition.

In Albisola, the work enters into a strong relationship with a place marked by seasonality and its rituals, by passage and memory. The exhibition suspends the logic of the rapid consumption of images and invites viewers to linger in a slower perceptual mode, in which the landscape appears in slippage, returning without ever fully coinciding with itself. Not a view to be possessed, Water Falls Once presents itself as an experience to be moved through, suspended between what passes and what remains.