This scene first struck my eye because of the unique way that the sky is reflected in the surface below, like a mirror. It felt surreal to me, and several years later I was able to come back to film this video work. Mirror State is silent, and shown on a loop, to give the feeling of a scene being suspended in time. I’m very interested in the space between still and moving images, and wanted to create a work that felt like a moving photograph.

I’ve always been drawn to slow, understated scenes, ones that might otherwise be considered ordinary but which I see as having interesting dynamics just under the surface. The scenes are often, but not always, in spaces that are in-between somehow; for example in an airport terminal, or in this case, a rest stop off of a highway. Here, I was interested in observing these small constellations of people as they moved about the landscape, constantly photographing themselves and each other.

I found myself thinking about bigger ideas about time as well. Here, we have layers upon layers of different timescales: the time of the camera shutter making an image, in a fraction of a second; those images being sent instantly into a digital elsewhere; simultaneously being present and not present. I also thought about the deep time of the desert – geological time – here, we can see traces of shorelines as far back as the Ice Age. Human impact is also present, even if not visible, as this is also where the assembly of the atomic bomb took place.