Breathtakingly beautiful, like all of Janet Biggs’s work, A Step on the Sun (2012) is also—again characteristically—a haunting account of several kinds of mortal danger. This wordless, five-screen video projection was mostly shot at a sulfur mine inside an active volcano in East Java, where unsupervised miners labor in unspeakable conditions. As always, Biggs was the principle cameraperson, and assumed some of the same risks her subjects did. We see a lone miner ascend the forbiddingly steep, rocky interior of the crater, bearing more than his body weight in sulfur crystals. Clouds of gas provide a poisonous, intoxicating yellow glow. Bookending the roughly ten-minute loop is footage taken by a camera attached to a weather balloon, along with documentation of the meteorological station the balloon serves: a note of buoyancy, however fragile. Music, a significant element throughout Biggs’s work, consists here of a cello composition written and played by William Martina.
Biggs’s videos, which she began exhibiting in the early 1990s, have lately taken her to the Taklamakan Desert in China; the Afar Triangle of East Africa; and the Norwegian Arctic. Most recently she has been a resident at a simulation site designed to prepare for manned travel to Mars. Her sensibility evokes Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad, and also such conflict-zone photojournalists as Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, with this difference: Biggs’s geography is skewed not just to remote and dangerous areas, but to instability more generally, to places where sand whips up, lakes boil and oceans freeze. She likes going underground, and also diving deep into the mechanisms of consciousness and its vulnerabilities, as in individuals suffering from autism or Alzheimer’s. In short, Biggs’s subject is anything that could be called shaky ground.
