Operating outside of cinema’s darkened room and free of the masked constraints of pre-cinematic devices, Mylayne nevertheless manages to attain the heightened real effect of what Krauss acutely terms the “temporal dilation” of the stereoscopic image; in the shifting planes of focus and middle distance provided by a participatory subject, the artist explores images that sidestep the rationale of photography as time captured for a more open register. 9 And even though Mylayne continues to acknowledge his own previous statement regarding man’s isolation as a paradoxical, ambiguous relationship with time—where “a vertiginous intoxicating acuity is pitted against an insidious otherness,” 10 —his work continually revises the gap between.

Whether the regal profile of a bluebird posing on a barbed-wire fencepost in No. 414, December 2005-January February 2007, its light blue chest and darker crest disappearing perfectly into a gradation of vaulted blue sky , or in his new still life juxtapositions of cardinals and mésange charbonières alongside fallen fruit—including No. PO 42, March April

May 2007, No. PO 30, January February 2006, and No. PO 32, March April 2007—Mylayne’s images have attained a virtuosity wherein the birds seem to arrive as if for an appointment, their canny presence conveying the event of having been long perceived. Impossible to achieve with either a doubled or elongated exposure, Mylayne coaxes moments of acknowledgement from his accomplice performers that join with the savvy limitations of his technique in seeming to defy the entropy of time. Perhaps no image conveys this more readily than the perched repose of No. 425, January February March 2007. Part of a sequence of images that appeared in his most recent gallery exhibition—the vermilion flycatchers of No. 424 January February March 2007 and No. 426 January February March 2007 complete the trio—No. 425 features a refulgent being alighted on the tip of a ghosted sapling, the serried folds of a derelict fence, copse of trees, and scraggy ridge beyond. Turned away from the camera but with a discerning glance back at the man behind, Mylayne and bluebird collaborate across the divide.

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