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BOREALIS 1993 |
| A PROJECTED
VIDEO ENVIRONMENT BY STEINA |
| Steina’s means are simple.
She takes stunningly beautiful yet turbulent clips
of nature in her native Iceland, enlarges them,
then turns them on end, literally and figuratively,
so that they may be experienced as living abstractions
on a scale equal to that of the human body. The
effect is to tear them from their entrenchment
in the cliché so they may be perceived free from
the drag of representational history. Nature,
having somehow survived the twentieth century
onslaught of archaic industrial insults, speaks
in the only way it can, through stormy electronic
images by an artist with roots both in urban culture
and in a remote land still precariously preserved in ice. |
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LANE BARDEN |
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| D E S C R I P T I O N |
| BOREALIS is a projected video environment
with two video and four audio channels of presentation.
The projectors, laid on their sides, provide an
upright ratio for large projection screens, hung
vertically in the exhibit space. Half-transparent
mirrors, are placed in the projection pathway
splitting and directing the image onto two additional
screens, now four in total. The screens are made
of translucent material that shows images with
equal intensity on both surfaces, front and rear.
The result is eight vertically viewed large images,
placed in an irregular pattern, which harmonizes
with the exhibition space. The program comes in
the form of a ten-minute repeating loop. Each
of the two video laser disc players provides one
video and two audio sources to the two projectors
and four speakers. At the end of each cycle, a
laser disk synchronizer aligns the two video players
for a repeat performance. |
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