Meg Roussos

Issue 155

My artistic practice is cultivated from personal experiences in the wilderness. I use photography in the traditional sense to yield a picture but also as the medium to document installations and performances. My site-responsive art requires dragging materials into the landscape, carrying my camera and sinking in the snow. I work across multiple disciplines to allow ideas to take form in traditional imagery, photographic artist books, documentation of land art, or videos.

Pseudo Night explores the representation and sublimation of walking through a landscape. The night trail images are a constructed reflection of my experience with long distance hiking. I photograph trails in a way to reflect the suspended meditative moment in time that happens during my long walks. This effect is meant to mimic the night, although I photograph during the day. This practice references old western films that used to produce night scenes during the day. Playing with traditional troupes in imagery, such as the Rückenfigur or presence through absence, these images both invite and caution one to the edge of the woods.

Interventions is a series of conceptual works in collaboration with the landscape. Just In Case, I Carry You With Me, incorporates four video stills sequentially documenting myself walking while carrying my personal pulaski. Untitled, Burial, are still frames taken from a 3 hours and 14 minute video where I buried a Christmas tree. Eclipse, is a photographic still from a video where I throw snowballs off screen trying to create a manmade eclipse. Inlay exhibits three panel documentation of a 16-foot wood floor embed in a high traffic path I constructed and installed. These land interventions documentations become individual works to be considered. Trail Cut, incorporates five video stills sequentially documenting myself cutting a trail into a snowy hillside in Colorado. Within all video stills, the photographs themselves become individual works to be considered.

Meg Roussos (she/her) lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
megroussos.com | @megroussos