Earlier this November, which is Native American History Month, a silent yet powerful exhibit opened at Visual Studies Workshop. "Thirteen Views in Arid Lands," created by artists Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens - the duo behind audio-visual art team Potter-Belmar Labs - explores views of lonely landscapes in the American southwest, bereft of the original people who inhabited the now largely rejected terrain.

Raymond and Stevens are "fascinated by tensions in time," says the exhibition essay, penned by RIT professor Geoffrey Alan Rhodes. The installation features slowly scrolling 360 degree views of the dry and varying landscapes, offering a quiet, peaceful meditation on this relatively undisturbed land, deemed unlivable by mainstream modern Americans. A secret insidiousness is revealed in the exhibition essay, which discusses the work's intended focus on what is not seen. Suddenly, the innocuous peace and emptiness of the land turns sinister - the waste of the open land, the waste of the natives' deaths, their presence driven off the largely unused spaces.

The panoramic views of 13 spaces scroll over one wall, a corner, and onto another wall, but the artists have added depth to the element of time. The installation is actually a line of five separate squares, each representing a channel of the panoramic stop-motion videos. Each channel is not a video of the panorama, but a stop-motion video made of thousands of sequential photographs shot with a carefully rotating camera. Thus, each square captures the shifting of time in that 360 degree view at a specific hour. Though the panoramas meet up at the edges of the squares, conditions such as light and cloud presence and the effect of wind on plants vary from screen to screen. The effect creates "points of tension in the compositional mapping," says Rhodes. "It is a perfect spatial panorama but sliced into five different times."

The effect is a slightly disjointed view of each area that was shot. "These five channels of video are stitched together to create a 360 degree horizon," says Rhodes, "but time is the remainder of the equation and is left vibrating and expressive on screen, telling its own story." Watching the subtle differences in shade and light, my imagination filled in heat and sweatiness, squinting eyes in unforgiving, garish light, or the blessed relief of sparse shade under scrubby trees.

"These images are a contradiction: time moving at a frenetic pace in lonely spots where time seems hardly to exist or matter," says Rhodes. "‘Thirteen Views' evokes the temporal side of isolation, the way not only space, but also duration seem to close up these imperfect cowboy horizons - you, the observer, are the only reference point in space and time."

These images are paired with cryptic messages. "The artists have added selected text from the reports and journals of the United States soldiers and Apache Indians who were on opposite sides of the massive manhunt for Geronimo across the Southwestern U.S. in the 1880's," says Rhodes. "Like these landscapes, they describe a suspension of time in an empty horizon."

The initial words appearing at the first scene mirror the experience of the photographers in the desolate lands. "A silence of several weeks fell," it reads, and is paired with images of thick stands of trees, blue-ish mountains in the distance, fallen trunks in the foreground.

Like the terrain, the video is imperfect, but interest and value is found within. A blurry/hazy effect is created by a film made of single frames that captured trees in mid sway and grass whipping in the dry wind. The "video" would be smoother if was straight video and sped up, but it would feel more immediately quick and lose the sense of rapidly fleeting time.

One panorama ends and gives way to fields of alternating temporality: golden light or ominously stormy skies in separate frames, paired with words, likely from the U.S. soldiers' side, which again mirror the artists' experience: "spying out the country in advance in every direction." Next, "not a breath of fresh air stirring" reveals dry brush and shrubs, images of hardy life, silent and desolate.

Wide open skies and rocky terrain are paired with the phrase, "lands considered worth about a thousand dollars less than nothing," revealing the attitude of the soldiers. Cool shadows bring occasional relief amidst nearly neon orange seas of tall grass, under crisp blue skies. Other phrases are more ambiguous as to which side is speaking: "the effect of old injuries revived" introduces golden fields of sun-scorched grass, and patches of shade under gnarled trees among the hills. Dots of these trees are seen in sweeping valleys as the camera turns.

Cobblestone walls mark the ruins of old settlements amid mountains, dry shrubs, and dirt, and are paired with the sentiment that "this place was almost uninhabitable, but we had to stay there," again with the uncertainty of which side is speaking. "We again travelled fast and without incident" switches our view to indications of modernity with a railroad and tall grass, one frame revealing a train that disappears in the next, several times in different frames, emphasizing the temporal differences. Swinging around, we see a dirt road in the dim light of a low, weak sun. A person in one frame trudges along, and disappears in the next.

"The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we say" is paired with another lonely vista of grass, sand, boulders, and a distant busy road. A forlorn scene of sheds, power lines, snow, and wind-blown grass is set up by the words: "Anyone can kill an enemy, but it takes a strong man to kill a friend." "We know they are near" is again ambiguous and ominous, paired with paved roads, a gray sky, store fronts, and passing cars, which shifts to golden grass and train tracks, and houses on the other side.

"It is like this camera is searching for something completely lost, irrevocably gone," says Rhodes. "Not just in space, but also in time. Not just their bodies, but moreover their images are lost in this landscape." Appropriately, the videos move from utter wilderness to increased evidence of contemporary life, and finally a thoroughly modernized landscape with the phrase, "We were forced to look for you," followed by crisscrossing, raised freeway overpasses, viewed from below. The viewer sees palm trees and the thick cylinder legs raising the roads, cars flying by overhead, and the occasional person trudging along underneath the roads, normally invisible to our eyes.

"Thirteen Views in Arid Lands"

By Potter-Belmar Studios

Through December 18

Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince St.

442-8676 | vsw.org

Thursday 5-8 p.m., Saturday-Sunday noon-5 p.m.