The experimental video artist Mary Lucier turns the medium that she pioneered in the 1970s in a distinctly personal direction in a wonderful new installation called Leaving Earth. The piece begins with a screen scrolling short, ruminative phrases excerpted from a journal kept by Lucier’s husband, the painter Robert Berlind, recording his thoughts on his approaching death in 2015.
These phrases also appear on several other screens affixed at different levels to upright poles in front of the gallery’s west-facing windows. But here the words are interspersed with a succession of images, still and moving. Some are snapshot-like: faces of family and friends; the interior of the house in upstate New York that Lucier and her husband shared. Nature is ever-present in close-ups of breeze-touched field flowers and nesting birds. Mortality, repeatedly, intrudes: in a shot of ground zero on Sept. 11; in pitilessly sustained footage of a dying fawn breathing its last.
Lucier is silently present for all of this: Her face, passive, stares down from a high-up screen. And her husband is present too, seen swimming underwater in a clear stream. “Leaving Earth” is a deeply emotional piece, and a complicated one: a heartfelt lament, a stoic salute and a thing of great beauty.
