Frank Oudeman, 56 Leonard, 2016 - moving picture still #1. Design: Herzog & de Meuron. Client: Alexico Group LLC.

Manhattan towers built for an elite clientele, these are extraordinarily privileged locations with highly coveted and majestically-valued views of the urban architectural landscape.
Photography and video allow for a flattening of reality. Flat to full, opaque to rounded, plane to air, these windows – along with the views, wonder, and desire they signify – are compressed into graphic symbols. In these two moving pictures, I neutralize the drama that these residences boast in their soaring heights. I make it anti-climactic. All design, ego, and individuated form is obscured. A slow, meditative framing opens into a layer of movement and weather. A crescendo reveals. My approach is to invert expectations, to disrupt any presumed experience.
Placing these works in the exhibition Time-Space-Existence is intended as experimental, to expand upon the way we typically view these spaces – visually and spatially but also culturally, economically, and psychologically – and to reveal other ways of viewing them, our cityscapes, and ourselves in relation. My goal for the work is to contribute conceptually and spatially evocative understandings and viewpoints to the conversations about architecture and about architecture photography. The exhibition aims to enlarge awareness of how we view and live among these built structures.
Frank Oudeman is a Dutch born artist and photographer currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York.