Among recent artwork and global exhibitions addressing precarious migration, Janet Biggs’s Overview Effect, debuting in the U.S. at Cristin Tierney Gallery, is especially seductive. Biggs’s music, performance, and video work combines advanced technology and precision tools with on-the-ground investigation, often in extreme conditions, from the sulfurous interior of an active volcano to the labyrinth of a salt crystal cave or the glacial waters of the Arctic. Biggs’s compositions are attentive to duration and scale and attuned to vulnerability as well as resilience. In two new video installations presented by Cristin Tierney, Weighing Life Without a Scale (2018), on view June 6th through 30th, and Seeing Constellations in the Darkness Between Stars (2018), on view July 8th through August 2nd, Biggs weighs the utopian promise of dissolving borders in contexts shaped by systemic instabilities.
Drawing on footage from the artist’s residency at the Mars Desert Research Station in Hicksville, Utah, as well as images of refugees and migrants in Djibouti, these two videos plant us in inhospitable terrain, centering climate change and following groups of scientists as they explore the possibilities of colonizing Mars. Weighing Life Without a Scale depicts the resolute movement of researchers and refugees through the desert. Through a delicate choreography of macro and micro—industrial technology and analog forms of social life—the artist makes resonant visual connections between these worlds. We see the curved line of the earth’s horizon reappear in the sphere of a geodesic dome, the astronaut’s helmet, and the marbles lying in the dirt of the refugee camp.
