Landscape

Everglades is a project Levy began while a resident artist in Florida's Everglades National Park. The unique natural environment of the Everglades has been devastated by decades of wetlands drainage for purposes of industrial and residential development, and today it is threatened by fracking and deep water drilling. At the same time, efforts have been made to restore some of the original ecosystems through a process of re-flooding, not unlike the restoration of Lake Hula in the north of Israel.

Appealing concurrently in this video essay to various meanings of the term “Subatlantic” — a climatic phase beginning 2,500 years ago, as well as the submerged regions of the Atlantic — Biemann immerses her camera deep in oceanic waters to ponder upon the entanglements of geological time with that of human history.

E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism. Originally designed as a monumental space for public performance and collective acts of solidarity to the Fascist regime, this landscape was in fact never inaugurated.

One of my weather diary series out in Oklahoma. The tone is wistful, the surroundings wispy (with some puffs of pungency). The TV is on and the porcelain is smeared with some residue atrocity from a previous passion. But all is well as emptiness persists beyond the four walls of this prairie mausoleum.

Here You Are Before the Trees is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

Here You Are Before the Trees traverses Indigenous presence in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the areas in-between. Each screen focuses on different homelands and their complex relationships with history, landscape, power and institutional means of oppression. 

1.1 Acre Flat Screen is a 45-minute video about a year-long effort to improve a lot of 1.1 acres of desert land in Utah, which we purchased on September 4th 2002 on eBay. The video starts with ways of finding a lot in the desert, using satellite images, topographical maps, a compass and string. It displays ideas and plans on how to improve the land’s value and documents our preparations to face the unforgiving desert.

A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

Rackstraw Downes’s “observation” paintings, executed on-site at ponds, intersections, and baseball parks, began as a mischievous response to the dogma of style and modernist criticism.

“There was a tremendous intellectual back-up, essentially against a lot of the figurative painting being done in the ’60s,” Downes says in this interview with Robert Storr. “If I show my slides in an art school I’ll get, 'Your paintings are very nice but how can you go backwards from Cézanne?’”