YVONNE SINGER
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The air I breath is the air you touch, ​2016

Photo: Andrew Testa
Installation: Gales Gallery, York University

Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air. 
Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain


The pair of scrolls, titled, the air I breath is the air you touch comprises a selection of the photos I have taken over this long period of time. There are thousands more and I am considering whether to add more scrolls to this series. How airplanes fly and stay in the air is a mystery to me. The experience of flying, from take-off to slowly climbing higher and higher watching the city and landscape below becoming smaller and smaller offers an aerial perspective from my airplane window that is endlessly fascinating. Since 2007, I have been taking photos from my airplane window with my iphone, prompted by recurring trips between Los Angeles-Toronto and Toronto-Montreal. From the frequent trips, I began to identify the topography, noting landmarks along the way to track our flight.  While the landmarks are the same on each trip, no trip is ever exactly the same…my window seat changes, the light on the landscape or on the wing tip changes and there are seasonal changes. Other flights to Italy, London, Australia also form part of this collection of photographs on the scroll. Detached from the earth, in a state of suspended animation so high above the ground our confinement in the airplane capsule prompts philosophical reflections about the phenomenological experience of time and space and the reorientation of our perception.  There is also the visceral, visual sensations of floating above the clouds that appear so solid but are not.
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