Mary Lucier: Leaving Earth
Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York, January 19 – March 2
"A succession of discontinuous moments occur then disappear, without the elemental structure of sequence." These words, which feature in the text of the multichannel video Leaving Earth, were found by Lucier in the final journal kept by her husband, the late painter and writer Robert Berlind, who died of cancer in December 2015. Lucier, a pioneer of video art and video installation, has made work on the subject of loss and regeneration for many years. In Noah’s Raven (1993) she explores the imprint of catastrophic phenomena on the landscape with footage shot in Alaska, the Ohio River and the Brazilian Amazon; in Floodsongs (1998), the installation presents the people of Grand Forks, North Dakota, a town devastated by the 1997 Red River Flood, talking about their lives before and after the disaster. In this new piece, she turns to a more personal and intimate subject matter, which like the other works is defined by a sense of loss and grief, but also of warmth and humanity. Lucier has described Leaving Earth as a work where "words, pictures, and sound become interchangeable, not serving as descriptions but as a rumination on reality and a form of coping". The above quote from Berlind’s journal continues "And yet… I forget to fear death" in another form of tender affirmation of life – that is, a form of coping.
