In a fraction of a second, a photograph reduces all motion to one frozen moment. These snapshots depict one tiny piece of the continuum that we understand as time’s normal passage. But photography is only a souvenir of a moment, one step removed from the actual experience itself. When you look at a photograph to revisit your memory of that moment, it is not the experience itself: it is a token of the experience, a keepsake, something to jog the memory.
Manifest Destiny distills a frozen moment in full 3-dimensional space. Within this immersive installation, you get to explore one photographic moment in time as an actual physical experience. As time’s passage is stopped, the sculptures become objects of arrested motion presented in narrative vignettes. The installation fills all your senses, not just your eyes. You move through time while your surroundings hold their breath and stand still around you. You are free to explore at your leisure; like you have stepped into a photograph and have all the time in the world to explore the nuances of that one fleeting moment… without the moment passing you by before you’ve had a chance to register its details or its meaning.
And it is in these still moments that beauty is captured. Beauty is not a blur but in the details: a simple image that burns itself into your mind’s eye and takes your breath away and stays with you forever…. The quality of light through trees, a lover’s graceful hand, the moment of flight as a bird strives between sky and ground….Each of these moments recalls a certain time and place, reminds you of who you are and where you’ve been and conjures a specific feeling and state of mind. I wish to conjure for you; to create a feeling without words that calls out to the other spaces and times kept inside each of us.
—Renée Cinderhouse,
August 2012
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