Still from Wilderness, 1986.
Regarded as a pioneer of video sculpture and installation, Mary Lucier’s work is often concerned with the irreconcilable relationship between humans, their technology, and the natural. In her 1975 video Dawn Burn, the artist aims her video camera at the sky at sunrise over the course of several days. Rather than produce a clichéd scene, Lucier documents the sun’s effects on the delicate tube of the video camera and the subsequent wound it produces on the screen. Lucier's related artwork, Equinox (1979/2016), was recently on view in New York as part of Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974–1995 (organized by the MIT List Center). The exhibition provided us with an occasion to sit down together and reflect on her career, from the storied performances of the Sonic Arts Union to her continued experimentations with the video medium. We ruminated on her interest in the material conditions of technological reproduction and how her sustained investigation of the landscape—as it relates to trauma, culture, memory, and autobiography—offers a prescient communiqué for our current moment of epochal ecological crisis.
