Mary Lucier's new video installation The Plains of Sweet Regret is a poignant visual tone-poem of the emptying out of America's northernmost praries. It surrounds the viewer with five projections fed by separate video channels, animating the walls of the narrow, darkened gallery and, initially, creating a powerful impression of being transported west-ward past wintry flatlands, ghost buildings and once-grand barns.
It all weaves into the tapestry of lush images, leaving the viewer with some tantalizing, irresolvable enigmas. Lucier's true artistic soul mates come from before the advent of the new media she helped pioneer- they are the 19th-century landscape painters who had such genius at finding, within the countryside, the most profound of life's truths.
