Plot Against Time #2 (Flurry)

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The second in the series, "Plot Against Time #2 (flurry)", tracks individual snowflakes whirling in the complex turbulence created by the rigorous and minimal forms of Mies van der Rohe's Toronto Dominion Centre skyscrapers and the Al McWilliams sculpture in the middle of the complex. The camera captures the snow against the background of the Serra sculpture and the lowest of the buildings from within the sculpture. The video footage is processed to separate the snowflakes from the background, then the material has been reworked to draw out and highlight the complex paths that individual flakes follow. The artist plays with a kind of temporal depth of field in which moving objects are in focus and things that are still are blurred, and variously reveals and hides the snow's trajectories, with the flakes sometimes apparently inscribing their path, and at other times coursing through their future path like blood cells through arteries. The chaos of turbulent trajectories is in sharp contrast to the formal simplicity of the architecture and sculpture, but in fact, this complexity is largely a direct result of the encounter between these forms and the wind passing through them.