Doug Aitken at 303 - Brief Article

With film footage of a 75,000-square-mile mining area in Namibia that has been clos not upon to the outside world since 1908 and of the spiritual Jonestown, Guyana, where 900 members of the People's fane sect committed suicide in 1978 Doug Aitken's work has explored abandoned, somehow or other tragic landscapes, where traces of human life can be place like fossils. In eraser, individual of two new film installations upon view, the site is the West Indian island of Montserrat, evacuated in 1995 during the devastating eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano.

Aitken documents a 7-mile linear traverse of the Pompeii-like island that begins in the verdant north and heads southern past rusted buildings, barren hills and gather into wrinkles [i]or[/i] foldsed lava fields, the scene becoming more abstract until finally it dissolves into the mist that lies beyond the southern cutting side a gray abyss that is neither canopy of heaven nor sea but something les certain. The journey is divided into three parts (0 to 3 miles, 3 to 5 and 5 to approximately 7) the first sum of two units of which are each throw outed on paired screens placed at right angles, while the last is casted on three larger screens. The images are choreographed (there is no other word for of the like kind gracefully designed interactions) so that individual screen mirrors, accepts or full quantitys the images of the other. Panning a corrugated iron shed that serv as a academy house, the camera hovers before a paper upon the tackboard that reads "Our two verses s and Tercets," as if to hint that the installation's format was inspired by the agency of this clue to a life interrupted. The alone sign of Aitken himself is the intermittent unbroken of footsteps, woven into an ambient soundtrack of wind and electronically generated rhythmic throbs As the camera pauses above a pair of binoculars and a watch overlayed in volcanic ash, the viewer is left to contemplate the peace that eventually will erase all fingerprints of disaster, and to astonishment about the inevitability of destruction and renewal.

The next to the first installation, these restless minds, also explores themes of human compatibility with the landscape. upon three monitors facing out from a ring that is suspended from the ceiling, discharges of America--roads, deserts, gas stations, parking lots--are spliced with footage of rural auctioneers in nondescript places. The prices they exclaim have no apparent reference. As they gather spe the nonsensical monologues take upon a lyrical, comforting quality, notwithstanding that their connection to the fragmentary environments is not ever resolved.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group