Cristin Tierney Gallery is thrilled to present Mary Lucier’s video installation, Leaving Earth, in partnership with Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland. Lucier is an accomplished, renowned visual artist known for her contributions to video art, including multi-channel installations, since the early 1970s. Her work has received extensive institutional recognition throughout her career, including major museum presentations in Ohio: Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Cleveland, extending Abattoir’s mission to introduce historically important artists with Ohio connections to Cleveland audiences.
Leaving Earth opens Saturday, November 7, with a reception from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. The artist will give a brief talk at 5:00 pm.
Leaving Earth is a multi-channel video and sound installation inspired by excerpts from the final journal of Lucier’s late husband, the painter Robert Berlind. In this journal, Berlind fearlessly documented his thoughts on his impending death from a terminal illness. His writings reflect his appreciation of life with a remarkable lack of anxiety about the inevitable end—more curiosity than dread.
The imagery in Lucier’s work consists of sequences of protean video and still images filmed in both her domestic and working environments. Most were shot after Berlind’s passing, reflecting the world as she experienced it during his final days and after. Berlind’s terse epigraphs appear throughout as white text on a black background, serving as evocative companions to the flow of images in Leaving Earth.
pictures already formed
more remembrance than presence.
Lucier describes this nine-channel installation as one where "words, pictures, and sound become interchangeable, not serving as descriptions but as a rumination on reality and a form of coping." Unlike much of Lucier’s earlier work, it does not follow a synchronous and sequential internal structure, instead allowing for random juxtapositions, repetitive thoughts, and the possibility of chaos to occur, reflecting the potential disarray in the dying man's mind. The pictorial narrative in Leaving Earth is underscored by Berlind's description of his mental state:
a succession of discontinuous moments occur
then disappear
without the elemental structure of sequence
And yet . . . I forget to fear death
