The Show is Over

Okay, so the show isn't actually over, but my work on it is. I am, for the most part, done with my work on the Carnegie International. The opening was Friday May 2nd (which is like, a while ago), and was a lot of fun although I, like an idiot, forgot to take any pictures, but hopefully there will be some forthcoming photos from friends who were also there. Anyways, I arrived on Friday at around 9pm, and parking in the back, got my first chance to see the Doug Aitken film, which is projected on the front and back of the museum. Entitled Migration, his film involves beautiful footage of American wildlife - deer, a horse, a bison, hares, etc - in what appear to be abandoned, or at least empty hotel rooms. Seemed like an appropriate work for a show called Life on Mars. It's quite interesting to see the animals exploring the rooms, which are all still made up as if waiting for guests to arrive. From one perspective its pretty funny - theres something hilarious about the idea of opening your hotel room door and seeing a bison there in the middle of the room in a fairly confused state. A series of jump cuts showing first one hare on a bed, then two, then four, are also very funny. On the other hand, the piece looks at where we as people have come to, in our own evolution, that placing wild animals in idealized constructed living environments for humans creates such a sense of tension. Does this maybe infer that the inverse - humans out in the wild - is as unusual? Or maybe Doug Aitken just wanted to see some critters go wild in a Best Western. Regardless, its a beautiful film. Unfortunately, my camera is broken, so I can't include my own photos of it. But I can steal them from flickr...


He did a similar style piece on MOMA called "Sleepwalkers," last year, which looked really incredible. You can see a trailer for it here and video of it installed here.

Update: I found a cool image of "Sleepwalkers" when going through stuff I had on my flash drive from working on the CI08 catalog.