Timing Is Everything

Derek Besant


The Stages Event

Based on what I remember as grainy black and white newspaper photos of people caught in apartment buildings (usually in places like Buenos Aires or Hong Kong) on fire, and the dilemma of jumping to save their lives, or end them, I always saw the suspended moment as a kind of choreographic dance of death. Whether it was Orson Welles plummeting from the clock tower or a Hitchcockian Jimmy Stewart hanging on to the eves along a rooftop in Vertigo; the Italo Calvino dilemma of what might happen as events and chance migrate towards one another to oblivion, keep coming back in my work.

Vanishing point here takes on different meanings; however, the suspended moment, the green flash as sun sets on a horizon, the knife in the water, or the event caught out of the corner of one's eye; all conspire to the same place ultimately the vanishing point.