A Summer Retreat for Lindsey Vonn

by Caroline Chao (March ’19)

The world we inhabit is intrinsically connected to our mental operations, and our instinctual understanding of space. It is influenced by physical space, but perhaps more dependent on our subjective understanding of that space. This project examines the way we see and perceive – personal space, belongings, and memorabilia become a personal language – the only things that defines us from each other. These relationships are the remnants of ourselves – perhaps the only things we leave behind.

At its core, a retreat is a disruption to the typical pattern or continuity. A retreat is defined by its pace – we often escape to faraway destinations, seeking a place to operate a slower pace, to create a strange and different pattern within our normal lives.

Lindsey’s life, defined by the singular pursuit of skiing faster, does not allow a true retreat from normalcy. Thus, a retreat and normalcy cannot be separate; they are a creation of a resonance – two continuities that are simultaneously separate yet unable to be separated. In her typical continuity of ski racing, the faster space collapses, the better. There is a hard start – when the clock begins, and a hard end – the finish line. The condition is finite.

A Summer Retreat for Lindsey Vonn allows her to experience this continuity break down. It is a physical condition that would never exist within her typical understanding of space. It is a freezing of time and space collapse – a suspension in resonance – where the pace is neither fast nor slow. Frames appear to be a timeline, but instead, time breaks down and another world appears. Here there is no beginning and no end, no start marker and no finish line. There is only infinity.