Eyes Wide Open

Starting in New York and finishing in San Francisco, Stefan Hagen captures every aspect occurring and emerging in space and time over an eight-day journey by car between these two American cities. He points his camera forward, driving into and through the landscape to create a wide and inclusive image. He conjures the 19th century and its stories of migration and settlement, summoning a moment when curiosity and bravery propelled us to uncover and see for ourselves the continent’s vast and alluring beauty.

In this exhibition three distinct yet interrelated elements operate as one visual system. They include: a 30 x 40 inch print, 24 three-dimensional viewers with stereo images, and the exhibition site.

The single large print emits a kaleidoscopic history of people moving into the horizon for an encounter with the ever-receding frontier. In the 17th century New York is the border, by the middle of the 18th century it has shifted to the Ohio River valley, by the 19th century the Great Plains have occupied this post, and by the end of the Civil War the nation’s edge is conventionally understood as located and settled.

Although no longer mainstream, the “Turner Thesis” animates a palatable underpinning of Hagen’s photographic record. In his essay “The Problem of the West” published in the September 1896 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Frederick Jackson Turner theorizes:

The West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears, the “West” proper passes on to a new frontier, and, in the former area, a new society has emerged from this contact with the backwoods. Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions, and assimilates itself to the type of the older social conditions of the East; but it bears within it enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the East.

Hagen suggests an elaboration on Turner’s exposition, recalling the musings and theories of contemporary historians. The large print is a single exposure that is taken over eight days. The landscape is blurred, asserting this frontier as allusive, an impossible possible place, a utopia. For this project, Hagen activates the quality and fortitude, the magical potential of a chemical coated plastic to absorb and reveal an infinitude of detail and information with a finesse that conveys the primary aspirations that motivates a move across land. This work is viewed in an open communal space. In contrast, individual viewers provide a highly intimate experience for three-dimensional images of intensely specific scenes, for instance: corn fields, rocky outcrops, waterfalls, and sunflowers. The interplay of an open vista containing a journey west and a set of three-dimensional images taken along the way tells an experience and a story. The moment Europeans and their descendants came into contact with the frontier, it would melt away, receding into the future and further into the West. Hagen performs the nation’s border as a fluid membrane that ebbs and flows across the continent, never static, never reified. His lens gobbles up the land and its light at high speed and in constant motion, like the frontier the image is not tied to time or place, it is a continuum. The highly specific historical setting of the log cabin as exhibition site is somehow a panoramic understanding of the artist’s subject, the land and its limits. This cabin was the residence and studio of C.C.A Christensen (1831-1912), an esteemed artist from Norway who settled his family in Ephraim. Like many of the great history painters, and Hagen himself, Christensen worked to narrate the intensely spiritual, emotionally exhaustive, and physically rigorous experience of a people driven to traverse and eventually settle inhospitable territory. In Crossing the Continent, Hagen provocatively erases the details humans have etched onto the continent. There is no sign of verticality in this large photo – not one reference to the human imprint of towers, strip malls, or even a house. This meta-narrative and its overarching story of an empty paved road tracing the well worn trails and path of times past, is contrasted with 24 discrete views of the land’s flora and topographical features that convey what is pristine and untouched by the human hand – there to be admired -- there to inspire a move west. A question that seems to underpin this entire project is: what do we imagine looking intensely, with focus and unfaltering attention will bring us. If you do not blink will you know everything. The agony of seeing all and sieving through that information is the job of Hagen’s lens that travels a route steeped in a complex history of violent encounters that were, seemingly, necessitated by a larger purpose of different pioneering folk who made their way west in search of riches and routes to other, wider, farther flung places.

Yasmeen M. Siddiqui, 2010