Matthew Day Jackson
The international contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth asked us for some very specialist time lapse last summer, and we’re now able to write about it. American artist Matthew Day Jackson held an exhibition at the London gallery – Everything Leads to Another. Part of this was a series of ‘golems’ – representations of the artist’s body, sculpted from different materials. ‘Food Golem – sweet’ was photographed, then taken off to the launch party to be eaten. ‘Food Golem – savoury’ – made from a terrine of pork gelatine and vegetables – was photographed, then shipped off to a secret location in East London…
And that’s where we come in. We were asked to design and build an entire lighting and time lapse photography rig of the highest possible quality – in order to create a fine-art standard time lapse film of the Golem deteriorating. We designed a rig made from lightweight aluminum, and used the equivalent of 20kw of low-temperature, low-power, colour-accurate ‘grow lights’ from Green’s Horticulture here in Bristol. Matthew wanted the film to have a look that was as ‘flat and surgical as possible’ – these lights really worked to create the right effect.
Here’s John testing the rig out for size in the workshop. Technically, we used a modified Lobster Pot. We used a Canon 5D mk 2, standard for our Lobster Pot Extreme model, with the exceptionally fine Nikon 17-35 lens. The system shot a frame every ten minutes, for four months, with JPEG files going to Lobster Vision so that Matthew, based in New York, could check on progress at any time. The system had a mirrored pair of terabyte drives, so that RAW files at 5616 x 3744 could be stored safely.
At the end of the job, we had two drives with about 25,000 files on each, and we needed a team of industrial cleaners to clean up the equipment, which had become a somewhat smelly haven for flies…
The work was post-produced by Mark Wayman at ADi Audiovisual, for 4k display at a gallery in Switzerland.