Erica Cheung: Let’s start with the title of your fellowship project: Sitting a little way off, beyond the trees, so as to remain in the full ambit. How did you and Rin arrive at this specific phrasing, and how does this title frame and relate to the artwork?

Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik: We both play with language as a method to brainstorm, part of the work itself, or better understand our ideas. We discovered the word Ambit while discussing the work, it refers to the entire zone of action surrounding something, or the field in which it has an effect. An historical example is a parish of a church, the entire community served by a church is its ambit. During the development of the sculptures we studied the skeletons of bird wings, the full range of motion of a wing is its full ambit. It felt like a way to describe the expanded field around an artwork, the area within which it has an effect and where it is situated. It refers to how we both conceive of artworks as actors within a zone.

The rest of the title is a narrative description of how one would encounter the work, moving through a forest, a little ways off amongst the trees. It communicates a sense of intangibility, something being just out of reach. It also illustrates how we primarily experience the work mediated through a website in short moments of time over years.

EC:  Full Ambit follows four outdoor steel sculptures as they engage with their surroundings over time. Can you describe the shape and structure of your sculptures for us? How did the site where the sculptures are placed inform your decisions around their material, size, etc.?

JLK: We both have a history of interacting with water with our work. Many of Rindon’s works are soaked in ponds, sometimes for years at a time. Many of Jordan’s works are inspired by hydrology and amphibians. The material form of our sculptures are designed from a range of sources such as bird skeletons and weirs, and results in a synthetic, biomorphic but also technological visual language. They are designed to interact with the flow of water, harnessing the force of stagnation that we learned creates the transformative power of a wetland, but also starkly contrast with the organic and permeable materiality of a forested wetland. They are chrome-plated metal, impermeable, polished, unyielding. They set up their own inevitable failure as the elements will penetrate and alter them. This is part of our experiment to find the evidence of time in the works at the end of five years. 

EC: Viewers will likely only ever experience Full Ambit online (at fullambit.blackcube.art), rather than in person. How are you thinking about this relationship between the viewers and the sculptures? Why structure it in this way?

JLK: Making an artwork situated in a remote place requires a choice about mediation. For us, sharing the work in this way centers the effect of time. It also becomes an archive. The website is documentation, but it is also an extension of the work. It poses the question, are you getting the “real experience” if you visited in person? Or is viewing a series of captured moments in different seasons over the years a truer viewing of the work? Different land artists have had different approaches to mediation or the refusal to mediate the work at all. This is an experiment in one way to do so. 

EC: The Full Ambit website is fairly streamlined in design, with a few labels—such as timestamps, date, and directionality—under each video capture. Tell us about your intentions behind the look and feel for the page. How do you hope users engage with the website?

JLK: The website format is very much an appropriation of trail cams or other online live streams, most often at zoos, street corners, or surf cams. It also could be a replication of a white-walled gallery space in web format, or something resembling a scientific document, with everything stripped away other than the necessary data. In general, we want to mediate the experience at little as possible, allowing viewers to simply look.

EC: This project will continue for at least several years, during which seasonal water levels and other environmental factors will ebb and flow in tandem with the sculptures. How do you anticipate the work—both the tangible sculptures and their online presence—changing over time?

JLK: Central to our interest in the site for the project is the nature of a vernal pool as a body of water that appears and disappears each year. We were fascinated with making a work that would stand still and be subsumed and revealed throughout the seasonal cycles. We hope the footage captured over the years can share that feeling, as it allows the viewer to hit "fast forward" on time they as view clips from different seasons and years.

EC:  How does Full Ambit fit into the larger context of your practice?

JLK: We want to move forward land art practice. This tradition has a lot of pitfalls from the past, methods that are often extractive, destructive, or replicate colonial patterns of land seizure or erasure. It can feel like a third rail, but it also feels so relevant at this moment, with the natural world changing before our eyes every year. We feel like there is something worthwhile in the practice of land art, so this project is an attempt to move the tradition forward in a small way, making a work that is ephemeral, temporary, and doesn’t aspire to any permanent mark upon or ownership of the place.