This is Mary Miss' Veiled Landscape.

Veiled landscape is a series of inserted platforms in a clearing through the woods. Each platform is arranged along a created optical crosshair that has been interjected between them. The screens are a physical boundary instrument that filter and dissect the natural landscape in infinite ways, using layered subdivisions to constantly alter the view. Arrangement of the scene is dictated by the approach, navigation around, navigation onto and deviation around the platforms. The space between the body and the screen is critical to this idea of filtering, but also creates heightened senses by the constantly scaling scene. These veiled frames are an instrument through which the individual experiences the other platforms and visually navigates between them, the clearing and the woods. The significance of the eyes utilizing the screens as an instrument to hold and penetrate the layers of divisions and distances. The spatial experience of nature, as this plastic kind of experience, in a technical way through these screens makes the viewer acknowledge a layered division that is divorced from a scale that is known and allows us to make judgment. “…space can be measured and plotted, distances estimated…” (204) Because of the changing scales of each of these interventions as one descends the clearing, the space of the woods and the relationship from one screen to the next is constantly being reevaluated through the eye, which moves itself between these. The landscape becomes objectified through these screens, and infinitely, because as the person moves through, between and around the platforms they are constantly altering these distances and scales.

The way that the body is constantly moving and evaluating the space through the screens allows the person to be registering their own spatial intervals. The use of the geometry of the objects, as well as the orthogonal placement of them, as a vehicle to create a visual field that is more objectified. Although the composition on an orthogonal was not meant to be specific, there are certainly implications to that that are inherently important. What does it mean to insert oneself in an orthogonal manner into this place?

“The frequent use of telephoto lens and frontal shots reduces the plasticity of space and fuses figures and ground…the narrative drama dissolves into visual aesthetics. The elimination of depth serves the purpose of equalizing various elements of the visual field and turning characters into objects and vice versa… ‘What interests me now is setting characters in contact with things…’” (123 Pallasmaa).