The Orbis Obscurus works are usually free standing video sculptures, often grouped in exhibition space. Video screens act as pedestals or tables to support the reflective cylinders that offer insight into the hidden images.

Strait is an anamorphic video work with two images swirling simultaneously on the flat video surface, running together like mismatched slipping wheels. The viscous images flow around the bases of the reflective cylinders which are footed in stable islands.

From the viewpoints opposite each cylinder, the reflected image of the strange surface resolves itself into an image of water or air moving past a stable point of landscape.

In an earlier manifestation, Orbis Obscurus was presented as a thematically united group of four video sculptures. Involuting whorls of imagery appear to gyrate in blue space on the horizontal screens. On each surface a cylindrical mirror provides another view, resolving it into a flight over an earthly landscape. Each journey is extracted from historical and literary episodes that hold some ominous sway in the imagination, casting a fascinating shadow.

The flyovers were generated digitally; the visualization process creates a virtual “gods’ eye” view, an immortal, heightened, and charged stance toward chaotic earthly reality. On another level, this is the position of the viewer finding the vantage point of privilege where the curved mirror reflects the image correctly, solving and resolving the puzzle.

From the right angle and distance, the moving landscape is visible in the reflection. This piece, Yuma Crossing, imagines a crucial and climactic episode in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: an attack on disputed ferry crossing on the Colorado River near present day Yuma Arizona in 1849. Survivors make their way west to San Diego and the ocean.