Leaving Earth is a new multi-channel video installation by artist Mary Lucier (American, b. 1944). The artwork is the culmination of nearly nine years. Lucier began making video recordings for it shortly after her husband Robert Berlind (American, 1938-2015) was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Importantly, Leaving Earth is not an elegiac memorial—it is a layered meditation on death as it is experienced by the dying and by those closest to them. Lucier weaves together an assemblage of the spaces they inhabited, his absence and her memories of him. More than a medium that records the past, Lucier uses video to unfold the life she and Berlind lived together, before, during and after his death.
The work gets its title from a journal Berlind kept after his diagnosis. Its diaristic entries are incorporated as white text on black backgrounds amidst the video footage recorded by Lucier. Berlind was a painter, teacher, and astute critic. His subjects often return to the night, water, and trees observed from unusual perspectives which also appear as common themes in the videos of Leaving Earth. The carefully framed, largely static shots of the videos linger on their subjects as Lucier experienced the surroundings around their home in upstate New York and in New York City without him: the breeze passing through an open window, repairing a country house, an outdoor woodfire, close-ups of rust patterns, driving into New York City at night. But the incorporation of text and images together elides a single person's perspective and both artists remain present throughout
