abstraction, refining his vision of existential encounter instead around figurative repose. In fact, the only bird to appear frequently in mid flight in recent years is the hummingbird—including the foregrounding precision of No. 368, February March 2006, No. 417, April May 2007, and No. 421, April May 2007—whose frenzied wings and febrile disposition give the thrust of its body an unlikely appearance of stillness even against the geologic indifference of desiccated hills.

The slow moving No. 91, November December 1990, gets further into the shift in Mylayne’s work toward time’s fractured concurrence with pose. A crucial work in his overall oeuvre, the diptych features the ground-level approach and departure of the appropriately named white wagtail. Taking on the guise of a comic ‘about face’ routine, the hello and goodbye of the disinterested lead character is offset by the red door, parked vehicle, telephone pole, and pruned trees providing atmosphere, except that the puddle in the left image gives pause—for a significant amount of time has clearly lapsed between the two images. As the right image soon reveals two additional birds foraging in the blur across its center, just past the retreating wag tail, all givens suddenly become questions—is this actually the same bird in each image or is one a stand-in, which image came first, is the vehicle parked in the exact same spot, and who left their keys dangling in the door? By employing the before and after effect of a rain shower, Mylayne deftly underscores not only a cinematic predisposition to read images sequentially left to right but also an ingrained impulse on the part of the viewer toward identification with any pictured subject. The nearly farcical set-up is similar in style to Mylayne’s

ground-level view onto garish cowboy boots and a country bungalow in the rather iconic No.186, January February 2004, where the nearly camouflaged junco in the bottom left hand corner has taken over the role of spectator, surveying the domestic scene: mistaken identity, trading places, the subtle discrepancies played out in both works accentuate the increased engagement with artifice in Mylayne’s practice. 7

Anachronistic in all the possible inflections of the word, the artist’s avian performers appear to act against the rush of time in his later work, holding their pose even as time unfolds convulsively around them. With the birds providing a structural pause, Mylane is able to smuggle contradictory movements and a contingent perception of time into the still image. In a striking passage that could just as readily describe the effect of viewing a Mylayne photograph, art historian Rosalind Krauss has characterized the phenomenological impact of viewing stereoscopic imagery as producing a situation “not unlike that of looking at cinema” in the kinesthetic operations it requires of the viewer, constantly readjusting and scanning the image in repeated attempts to take it in:

The stereographic image appears multilayered, a steep gradient of different planes stretching away from the nearby space into depth. The operation of viewing this space involves scanning the field of the image, moving from its lower left corner, say, to its upper right. That much is like looking at a painting. But the actual experience of this scan is wholly different. As one moves, visually, through the stereoscopic tunnel from inspecting the nearest ground to attending to an object in the middle distance, one has the sensation of refocusing one’s eyes. And then again, into the farthest plane, another effort is made, and felt, to refocus. 8

<< >>