More Visual Grids: Marion Manning’s ‘Tracking Dawn’ Project

It may have become apparent that the series of images serving to illustrate the previous 2 posts have been arranged in a grid format: this has largely been nothing more than addressing the practicalities of composing a number of related images in a visually manageable manner. However, the subject of grids seems to be a recurring one at present, & here is the pretext for bringing attention & linking to a series of images similarly arranged thus.

I’d been doing a little research recently into the use of grids in painting & other visual art as a sideline related to a current topic of debate & theoretical exploration (the relation between is very likely to prove fruitless, alas), &, in the course of this, chanced whilst Googling upon something I found rather interesting & very aesthetically inspiring. The something in question is a website featuring the Canadian artist Marion Manning’s ‘Tracking Dawn’ pictorial project, which, all in all, was a fascinating undertaking & produced some wonderful visual results - some, indeed, quite spectacular, sumptuous, gorgeous & ravishing: a veritable aesthetic feast.

Essentially, Manning took a photograph of the dawn each morning over the course of the year straddling the turn of the millennia, June 1999 to June 2000, & her website presents a record of this process. It’s particularly interesting how this project relates to another inspiring one I’d mentioned in an earlier post, that featured in the film ‘Smoke’, fictional in this instance, of course, of a series of photographs, taken on a daily basis, same time, same place, of the same prospect yet, by virtue of their incidental details, all in fact unique. Although, in order to accommodate the change in position of the actual point-in-time of the sun’s rising over the course of the seasons & year, the artist has in fact had to shift the object of focus to a certain degree, fundamentally the photographs are taken from the same vantage point even if the view is slightly different & changing over time before returning to its original focus. However, each dawn reveals this (essentially the) same typically North American subject in a different light & produces a unique result – in terms of light & colour, prevailing weather conditions, vehicular (/human) activity, etc - arranged in weekly, seasonal & ‘best of’ formats on the website, which is well worth a visit: it’s a lovely idea, creatively worthwhile & a beautifully realised documentary enterprise.