First Wave

Red does not sit on the work as a coloured surface. It accumulates through ninety layers and enters the surrounding architecture as reflected light. Beyond the apparent boundary of the wave, this reflected red extends its force into the room and places the viewer within its chromatic field.

The colour carries several registers at once: blood, danger, heat, alarm, and physical intensity. Its saturation gives the wave an immediate bodily force, while transparency prevents that force from becoming a solid monument.

The title connects the temporal language of the pandemic with the art historical memory of Katsushika Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai’s image emerged during Japan’s long period of restricted contact with the outside world. First Wave was likewise shaped by isolation, although its image is expanded from a printed surface into a space of encounter.

Installed in a former fishing net warehouse for the Oku-Noto Triennale, the work joined the image of the sea to a building marked by maritime labour. Pandemic restrictions prevented the intended public encounter. Its later presentation at Penticton Art Gallery allowed the work to be experienced bodily for the first time in Canada.

The image is divided across ninety transparent planes, each painted with one section of the wave. Alignment produces the crest from a principal viewpoint. Movement exposes the construction, stretching the image until the wave becomes a sequence of red marks suspended in depth.

The work therefore shifts between picture and event. Its subject is not only represented motion, but the unstable process through which perception gathers fragments into a whole. The viewer’s changing position becomes part of the image.