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Purchased this spring by the Portland Art Museum for its permanent collection, PDX-based mixed-media artist Malia Jensen’s remarkable installation Nearer Nature: Worth Your Salt now plays continuously on the Jubitz Center’s third floor. Two synced screens have been divided into eight discrete perspectives displaying the same images so slightly separated by starting time that the barely observed figures on one screen appear to echo on the next. For the piece, Jensen fashioned salt licks into pieces that form a human body (a foot, a pair of breasts, a pile of doughnuts representing a stomach), then placed those sculptures across the state and surveilled them with motion-sensitive trail cameras to capture Oregon fauna confronting the art.
The self-described “sculptor working in video” collaborated with local video editor Ben Mercer to formulate a sequential structure encompassing the mathematical realities of rendering watchable footage amassed from six distinct sites filmed by three cameras each. Though six hours long, Worth Your Salt contains 24 hours of footage, none of which repeats. “Basically,” she says, “the template allowed us to sequence the footage using time as the organizing principle.”
While this meant they’d never need to “skim tens of thousands of clips to delete the occasional hiker or glitch, there was still a huge amount of editing,” Jensen says. “Making the larger piece required weaving all these different sequences together into a French braid of complex footage combinations.”
Jensen isn’t sure how many observers have seen the work, but the museum has provided a viewing bench, she notes. “There’s an immersive meditative quality meant to take you out of life’s daily torments. You can sit there tucked away for hours if you want.”