2016, 5 min., Super 8 transferred to HD

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson broke a landscape into pieces/units (rocks) and arranged those pieces into a spiral. In 2016, I traveled to his Spiral Jetty, used a camera to break it into pieces/units (frames), and arranged those pieces into a spiral.  Smithson needed two dump trucks, a tractor, a front loader, a crew, and over 6,000 tons of basalt to create spiral jetty; I needed a borrowed handheld camera and roll of small-gauge film to take it apart.  His work is deliberately monumental; mine is consciously human. His focus was on creating the spiral, and the thousands of tons of rocks used in the construction were a means to an end. The individual rocks and my navigation of them are where I focus my attention; the spiral exists only in the direction of movement, in the physical film reel, and in the title.  (In the viewing of the digital transfer, even the film spiral has been removed.)