From everyday digital recordings of visual images of the land, its natural processes, and elements, like water, I form the basis of my landscapes, in digital imaging, video and large scale imaging installations with referent images of nature or the landscape, from Kentucky or wherever I am at the moment including Louisville, New York City or Finland. My temporal experiences within nature inform formal foundational structures within my artworks through layering time-based media.
Since 2007 I have been creating solar powered light boxes, and integrating hydroelectricity into my video artworks. My most recent solar power light box, Solar/Water Studies is comprised of several Water/Sun, 2021- present where I am trying to visualize the invisible energy from the sun and the water. These are illuminated from the sun.
With Shift, 2021, was the first in this series that began when my daily encounter with nature left me feeling that my intra-acting with nature contained an invisible energy that was layered and covered by a “veil or mantle”. This was before I researched the ancient reference to the goddess Isis and the ‘Veil’ or mantle covering nature’s secrets.
48” x 96”, inkjet onto plexiglass, paint, gold leaf, wood
Shift, Video Installation, video projection onto (3) 8” x 10” layered digital prints onto 1/2” plexiglass, mounted on wood, plexiglass armature. Shift ,2021, was the first in the, Solar Water and Veil Series, that began in 2021, when my daily encounter with nature left me feeling that my intra-acting with nature was an indiscernible energy that was layered and covered by a “veil or mantle”.
48” x 48”, Inkjet print onto vinyl
Power-Fall
2018
5” Video Loop
Video
Beyond the tradition of landscape paintings that simply depict the landscape, Power-Fall is a video where the landscape, itself, is an active and crucial co-creator of its own moving image by supplying the waterfall energy that powered the video recorder and recording of itself, its own image.
3:50;00
From the Works on Water and Underwater NYC Artists Residency on Governor's Island 2018, Premiered New York, NY 2018.
The Language of Water
2019
(2) diptychs 18“ x 12” backlit films, solar powered light boxes
Einstein once described quantum mechanics as “Spooky action at a distance” an invisible world of atoms that is composed of even smaller particles that can be moved and affected without being touched. The imperceptible energy exchanges and mysterious movements between these subatomic particles can also be affected in more than place at one time and can occur thousands miles apart.
This is what interests me as an artist; the invisible and the imperceptible energy exchanges that engage our senses and challenge our perceptions. As Karan Barad states, “We are entangled or “deeply involved” in the intra-action and making of the world” and in the 2018 during Works on Water/Underwater New York Residency on Governors Island, I found this to be true.
During the residency I experimented with these unseen energies by freezing water from the East River in containers that had positive or negative words and computer codes etched onto them in the artwork, The Language of Water. Similar to Masaru Emoto’s experiments in the1980’s, documented in his book, The Hidden Messages of Water, I froze the river water in the same containers and then photographed the crystalline surfaces with astounding results. The “positive” words like gratitude created more uniform, harmonious surfaces, while the “negative words”, like hate had unsymmetrical, rough blemished looking surfaces.
For the 2019 Works on Water/Underwater NYC residency, I continued to work with the documentary photographs of The Language of Water, that documented the phenomena of the energy of transference and thought and written intentions. By installing and building solar powered light boxes and then transferring the digital photographs of the crystallized surfaces of water into diptychs in backlit film, I could begin to frame the unseen invisible transference or exchange of energy, much like the transformation of sunlight into electricity.
Bio:
With an art practice of creating digital video installations, solar-powered work, and micro-hydroelectric powered work, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs spends her time outside and in her studio on her farm in rural Kentucky. valeriefuchs.org
Spooky Actions At A Distance
2019
12” x 18” Solar powered light boxes, backlit film, solar panels.
In 2009, the Festival of Faiths in Louisville in 2009, had a theme of water, a lecture, by Masaru Emoto, and a blessing ceremony of water. Emoto, a Japanese researcher who discovered when negative or positive words were spoken, written on containers of water, then dropped onto a slide and frozen the structure of water seems to respond to energy given to it. Inspired by the lecture, I brought in a Mason jar with water from my creek to be blessed, and then I returned the blessed water to the creek. I attended the lecture of Masaru Emoto, a Japanese researcher who discovered that if you wrap negative or positive words around containers of water, freeze a drop onto a slide and take a photo, the structure of water seems to respond to energy you give it. The water crystal has a more perfect form if you give it positive energy, words like love, gratitude and a less than perfect form if you give it negative energy.
After the blessing of the creek, I have experienced two “spooky actions” on the creek, at the very point where I redeposited the blessed water at a waterfall.
Both incidences were small, but both had ideal outcomes. The first occurred when I was filming Power Fall for the Works on Water/Underwater NYC Residency in 2018. I had placed my truck keys in my shirt pocket, and without thinking I bent over to fix my hydroelectric generator, at the foot of the water fall when the keys fell out of my shirt pocket, into the flowing water and disappearing under a large rock. I tried to retrieve them, but I couldn’t reach or even see them and thought they were in the pool below. So I ran up the hill, to find a long branch to try fish them out from under the rock,. When I came back to the rock with roaring water all around, the keys were sitting just to the side of the rock they fell under…barely wet, and still worked.
During my residency, I considered these ideas and intentions, as I began by gathering the water of the East River, by throwing a bucket tied to a clothesline rope, over the surrounding fence. Then I researched containers/vessels for holy water at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which to store the water with different words, in computer code and English, etched into the glass or written onto them. The best part of being in NYC is that I could go to the MET and actually see the work in person, not through some mediated image or form. That became important as Egyptian funerary vases have images on the bottom to address the underworld. For my balancing vessel this research also became important. I froze the water in the residency freezer, and photographed with a macrofier reverse mount adapter to magnify the ice surface. The results were intriguing. I also became an ordained minister in NYC so I could dispel the negative energy in the water and return it to the river with a balanced energy. We had a critique on the last day of my residency and I received constructive feedback and support for this direction of my work. I hope to continue to work on these ideas and produce a new body of work including performance.
During the residency, the public was invited to visit our studios on the weekends and I decided to gather words and intentions for my vessels by asking the visitors “What would you say to water?”. The results were humorous and touching and helped to me decide on words like “gratitude, thank you”.
2018 one channel video projection onto solar panel, with solar power panels, vinyl print and solar battery
Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft
Play Power Plant video
Power Plant, 2018, 7” video projection, one channel video projection, video projector, dimensions variable, solar power bank, video projector, solar power battery, solar panels. Emulating nature, I wanted my video of radiating waves in my creek, to power itself, for 8 hours, with solar power 2018 Hadley Creatives, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY, 2019 Auto//Update, The Carnegie, Covington KY
Julien Robson, contemporary arts curator at PAFA in Philadelphia leads the artist talk for Live.Learn.Believe in front of bride stripped bare by her bachelors, solar powered light boxes mounted on electric poles, Georgetown College Campus, Georgetown, KY.
New acrylic version of the solar powered light box.
These were first part of the Current show at Swanson Reed Contemporary, Louisville KY curated by Rus Hulsey & Valerie Sullivan Fuchs and were installed along East Market Street in 2007 & 2008 and are currently up in 2011.
Taking the visible colors when light moves through a prisim, Fuchs overlays these colors on Eastern Kentucky Mountains and creates dye sublimation prints (10) on metal (uniqueimagingconcepts Louisville, KY) and mounts them onto electrical poles. Black and white prints begin and end the series.
These were first part of the Current show at Swanson Reed Contemporary, Louisville KY curated by Rus Hulsey & Valerie Sullivan Fuchs and were installed along East Market Street in 2007 & 2008 and are currently up in 2011.
Catalog from Parade Day, On::Procession with Indianapolis Art Museum & Fritz Haeg
