Film
Cassia Streb & Jennifer Bewerse
Mail Art
about the art
Orbital Inclination brings together a music film by Jennifer Bewerse and Cassia Streb and mail art by photographer Heather Palecek. Both works look to celestial movement as a way of observing and measuring time. Working at different timescales, the artists trace the predictable paths of the sun and moon while allowing light, weather, landscape, and sound to shape the resulting works.
Jennifer and Cassia’s film, Orbital Inclination, follows the Snow Moon (the February full moon) as it slowly rises over Joshua Tree. Jennifer filmed the moonrise, and Cassia recorded environmental sounds in the Utah desert. Using these images and sounds as a base layer, together they composed and performed a score of long viola and cello chords that move at the same steady, relentless pace as the rising moon. Halos of additional chords emerge around this progression, suggesting echoes of sounds that have already passed or sounds that are still to come. The moonrise and sounds unfold together, drawing attention to a cycle that is constantly changing but still predictable.
Heather Palecek works with historical photographic techniques shaped by the conditions of the natural world. In Jacob’s Creek, she uses a homemade pinhole camera to create a solargraph that traces the sun’s path over a 19-day exposure. Working slowly and embracing chance, Heather allows changes in light, movement, and weather to become part of the image itself. While the film asks us to experience the moon’s passage as it unfolds, Heather compresses many days of celestial movement into a single image, making visible a passage of time we could never observe all at once.