Martin Jarmick

A Mountain in Two Eyes began with writings on vision and depth and became a stereoscopic-3D video and sound work about the presence of Mount Rainier, an iconic peak in the northwestern US, through youth and later trials in adulthood. An excerpt from the text written for the piece:

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Depth is a sensed volume, an agreement created through difference. A synthesis of vision streams, each bearing a separate image to be delivered and assembled. It is a simultaneous difference-agreement, the resolution of two images, guided by intention. A choice, a focus, a region of interest pulls our vision, and our eyes converge. My body is positioned on the terra, a seeing self, seen from self, seeing. That which confronts me, defines me. My scale appears through the volumes I sense. These volumes. These depths. Sensed through two eyes oriented horizontally in a skull, bending on a column of vertebrae, blooming a network of nerves, and creating an image of sense. My limbs, skin, eyes, ears, nose are gatherers, painting their sensuous findings in the mind’s gallery. When confronted with a thing, these receptors open up like sails trying to catch wind. If the thing is small, like a coconut, I feel it from all sides, holding its volume. I smell its unique odor hovering closely around its form, and hear its throaty timbre sending small waves of sound when tapping it with fingers. These interactions define our scale in relation to the thing – the coconut scales us. We see it. Twice. We see it twice, from two sides, from two eyes – at once. Gripping the hard, round shell, we interact, but with two eyes, we enter its volume, its depth, its life.

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Stereo-pair images were captured on location using deep interaxial, placing the mountain and its surrounding range into stereo-depth for the first time and creating a visceral experience of a landscape typically limited to monocular depth perception.  In addition, voice passages about stereo-depth, childhood and transformation were recorded during shoots on the mountain, and this personal prose acts as an observer and point-of-view for the landscapes, an aural lens that colors the images with intimate reflections.