(2013 - present)
Part one
20 x 14 cm glicée prints, 100 images, installation dimensions variable
I am a member of a community at the forefront of the effects of climate change. I am from a small barrier island off the coast of New Jersey, called Ocean City. Hurricane Sandy made landfall just 10km north of the island in October 2012. As an artist working primarily in photography, I have been documenting changes to the natural and constructed environments of my hometown since Hurricane Sandy. The series is a part of a long-term research project that uses Ocean City as a case study of the effects of oceanic changes, in particular sea level rise, upon coastal communities.
The images in the first part of the series were taken one year after Hurricane Sandy. The storm made landfall 5 km from the point in which they were taken: my family’s home in Ocean City, New Jersey. It was the first time I had been home since the storm.
Looking out at the bay, I could sense something had changed, but I could not see what the change was. The marsh had shifted, parts were underwater or over the right perhaps. Or maybe the tides were slightly more extreme, as my mother reported. Nothing evident, and yet I knew there was something different.
The photographs are printed 20 cm x 14 cm: a size that renders slight differences in the images difficult to notice at first glance. They are displayed in a grid, the number and layout specific to the site.
OCEAN CITY
(2013 - present)
I am a member of a community at the forefront of the effects of climate change. I am from a small barrier island off the coast of New Jersey, called Ocean City. Hurricane Sandy made landfall just 10km north of the island in October 2012.
As an artist working primarily in photography, I have been documenting changes to the natural and constructed environments of my hometown since Hurricane Sandy. The series is a part of a long-term research project that uses Ocean City as a case study of the effects of oceanic changes, in particular sea level rise, upon coastal communities, and establishes an archive of the ways in which its residents are adapting to climate change.
The second part of the project aims to make visible patterns in construction that are made to combat rising sea levels and increased storms, changes to the constructed environment that are subsumbed over time. They capture the alterations to homes, the process of raising homes, changes in the general elevation of housing structures in new construction, and the real effects of the changes in the constructed environment has on its residents. In particular, I have been documenting raised housing, most notably during the phase of construction where houses are supported by box crib construction, and amended homes after construction is completed. I am interested in raised housing as a means to retain the known physical relationship to our surroundings in the context of an uncertain and changing environment.
Untitled (Seine)
(2022 - present)
This series is currently in production.
The series consists of large-scale photographs of wave patterns on rivers.
The images are taken manually in rapid succession like film stills. Taken manually, the frames are slower than the film standard of 24 frames per second.
We interpret the river and the flow through the haptic reconstruction of the water’s movement between the images.
The project was initially developed during a poetry residency at the Trélex Residency Paris.
(2013)
E-book: https://issuu.com/denise_monczewski/docs/guckmaleinberg
In my landscape works, I use different methodologies for recording movement through space to explore how bodily recording and muscle memory informs photographic documentation.
Guck mal, ein Berg! is the product of two hikes on the same trail taken over two consecutive days in Vals, Graubünden, Switzerland. The first hike was taken to record the bodily sensation of moving through the space; in the second hike I photographed the walk every few steps.
(2016)
In my landscape works, I use different recording methods to explore how bodily recording and muscle memory informs photographic documentation. The continuation of this research, which was in part inspired while hiking in the Swiss Alps, drew me to the fellowship program at the NAIRS Center for Contemporary Art, where I was a fellow in 2016.
NAIRS lies directly on the banks of the Inn River (En in Romansh, the local language) in a deep valley surrounded by the alpine peaks of the Swiss
National Park. The river is an omnipresent force. For four months I lived by the Inn, sleeping to its sound, recording the energy of its flow, in my ears, in my body, with cameras and sound recording devices.
I followed the river upstream and hiked to its source, the Lägh dal Lunghin, high in the Swiss Alps. Just above the lake lies the Lunghin Pass, Europe’s only triple watershed. The following image was taken from the top of the Pass, looking towards the surrounding mountains whose melt flows into the Inn.
2011-19
Blinds is a study in translation, medium, and alternative forms of storytelling. The series of four artists books, based loosely on the 1957 novel La Jalousie by Alain Robbe-Grillet, mine the source’s explorations into the use of photographic techniques to tell a story.
The novel consists of an unnamed narrator’s descriptions of the mise-en-scène and movements of the characters: these visual referents are recalled multiple times with varying degrees of consistency. Each successive chapter leads to greater and greater evidence of an affair via subtle shifts in details of the same events.
The project lies in the loose realization of these descriptions into photographs via staging, performing, photography and design. Each book tells a slightly different version of the story via a series of visual referents that as assembled resemble film stills. The viewer completes the story via their interpretation of the narrative. As the chapters are made into separate books with the same size and cover, each version is given equal weight.
