Commissioned for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, The Spectre was created as a response to the archive of Chicago artist Matt Hanner (1967–2011). The project centered on Hanner's three-hour field recording No Jets, made from his apartment beneath the flight path to O'Hare International Airport on September 11–12, 2001, after all commercial air traffic had been grounded. The recording captures the extraordinary presence of absence; three hours of an unexpectedly silent sky. Presented as an homage to Hanner's work, the installation brought together a limited-edition vinyl pressing of excerpts from No Jets alongside selections of his drawings, photographs, and ephemera. Academy Records responded with two new works: The Bower, a digitized 16mm film, and Full of Stars, a graphite wall drawing created specifically for the exhibition. The Bower originated as a single fourteen-second silent pan across cherry blossom trees on the street where Hanner had lived. Expanded algorithmically to match the three-hour duration of No Jets, the film begins in near stillness, its movement almost imperceptible. Over time the image gradually accelerates until the original speed is reached at the midpoint before symmetrically returning to stillness. Hovering between photograph and moving image, the work holds time in suspension, inviting sustained attention to the threshold where motion becomes nearly invisible. Full of Stars translated the temporal experience of Hanner's recording into a graphite field spanning the gallery wall, creating a spatial counterpart to the audio and film. Together, the recording, film, and drawing form an installation in which sound, image, and space become interconnected meditations on absence and presence, memory and loss, and the ways perception unfolds through duration.
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Gilded Splinters (Devices I)
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