The Low Anthem recorded their (soon to be released) album Smart Flesh in a big, cold, empty warehouse (actually an abandoned pasta sauce factory) in Rhode Island last winter.  Rob hunkered down with them, with some 16mm and some 35mm, and set about documenting the experience.

I remember Rob showing me the footage, a few months later — it was easy to visualize a nice landscape piece coming out of it, with that beautiful New England winter quality of light — but I don’t remember Rob telling me what he intended to do with it.

I’m a little surprised how cohesive it all feels, now! When I saw the footage for the first time, I saw it as a diary of the light in the warehouse — and it is, still — but not an expression of a sound or a feeling. But I hadn’t listened to the music yet (Oh, that music!)

The occasional bursts of color are lovely, as are the often different speeds of the film. The imperfect sync on the performers, too, lends a floating, ghostly, out-of-time quality to the images — Rob isn’t encouraging us to feel any immediacy; we’re watching from far away — and he cuts to them at just the right times, because he knows we’re aching to see their faces.

But what’s really killer about the video is how he doesn’t linger on those beautiful tableaus. Many of them don’t get the time they deserve; Rob’s a restless (to the point of irresponsible) editor, and it’s not what we’ve been trained to expect. Yet the images do become distinct moments, and are given appropriate gravity, with his consistent fades to black. It’s a really surprising technique, and with the hurried editing, it pushes the video towards a different feeling, somewhere between really long takes of landscape footage (the way I might have done it) and really choppy MTV (the way most music video artists would have done it). The contrast serves that feeling, that slipping away, that they don’t make em like they used to that Rob is talking about.

In her most recent work, Kate explores a space with her camera, prints the photos, reconstructs the space in three dimensions, and then re-photographs the scene.  In At The Seams, Kate disassembles and reassembles strangers’ houses, leaving doors poking out of the floor and fans reproducing across empty rooms.  In Wunderkammer (which translates to ‘cabinet of curiosities’), the stuffed animals at a museum seem to step right out of their displays. There is a wonderfully self-reflexive quality to the images, as Kate reconstructs what we imagine her experience to be exploring the spaces for the first time; there is also the entrancing quality of the uncanny, most powerful in the images least tampered with, those that reveal just a hint of Kate’s touch.

But there’s something else operating here: signs of construction—seams, folds, the way the glossy paper reflects the lighting—remind us that the images are handmade.  These aren’t spaces manipulated digitally: they are built, and it is the building that transforms Kate’s photographs into inhabited memories. In At The Seams, the titles of the photographs—such as not a single word, anna, or you should have come around the back—hint at something private between Kate and the owners, something learned in the space.  We are looking at dollhouses.

We are reminded, too, that the original spaces are themselves constructions.  In At The Seams, we begin to see the houses as homes.  In Wunderkammer, the constructed unreality of the museum comes to life, straight out of the curator’s dreams.

Check out Kate’s website here.