DANCING ANTELOPE #3
A few miles east of Page, Arizona, on the lands of the Navajo Nation one finds Hasdestwazi (meaning ”spiral rock arches”), the spectacular slot canyon known in English as Lower Antelope Canyon or The Corkscrew. On the flat surface of the desert is a rather unimposing crack in the dry sandstone, but on entering the crack and descending fifty or sixty feet down into the earth, one finds a world of sweeping swirls and flowing sandstone walls carved by millions of years of erosion. Flash floods bring rushing torrents of water and sand which, on entering the slot canyon, concentrate their power to scour the walls into incredible shapes. The principles of fluid dynamics at work, each pocket in the walls causes the scouring slurry to eddy which in turn sets up another eddy nearby. As each pocket changes shape through millions of years of scourings, the eddies of slurry change and all of the other scoops and swirls are affected. With light entering the canyon depths only from the narrow slit on the surface, color is distorted: purple, mauve, and orange predominate. The canyon walls, so reminiscent of flowing fabric, remind me of dancers leaping, twirling, gliding, costumes swirling with their every movement. This image was made on September 25, 2008.
The Springstep Gallery showed this image in The View from Here show in the Winter/Spring, 2008.
Copyright 2009 by William Tenney. All photography, artwork, images, and sound recordings on this site are the property of William Tenney.
