Giverny: Journal of an Unseen Garden

In 2010, Brooklyn-based artist Mark Fox spent three months living and working on the grounds of the Monet Foundation at Giverny, the home of legendary French painter Claude Monet. While in residence, Fox searched for a way to capture the iconic garden from a fresh perspective. This led to experimentation with underwater photography in the famed lily pond. Fox videotaped beneath the pond’s surface, marking hourly shifts of light and seasonal changes in this “unseen garden.” The result – Giverny : Journal of an Unseen Garden – pays homage to Monet’s practice of studying the effects of temporal shifts of light on a single subject. The video imagery – projected on multiple screens – resembles the long, horizontal orientation of Monet’s works in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris for which Monet created a series of large Nymphéas paintings and donated to the museum in 1922. 

Five screens each showing high definition underwater video footage during different times of day are looped in endless repetition and is intended to affect visitors in a way that’s consistent with Monet’s original concept for the l’Orangerie space – “to surround the viewer with a watery world.”

Says Fox: “The resulting images are surprising in the way they reveal an aspect of the garden unknown and oddly familiar in the ‘impressionistic’ atmosphere created by the light filtering through water.” 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website