Mary Lucier: The Plains of Sweet Regret

These terse, loaded declarations, presented in white type against vast, luminous grey screens, begin Mary Lucier’s video installation, The Plains of Sweet Regret, a meditation on the current state of the Prairie, commissioned as part of the North Dakota Museum of Art’s Emptying Out of the Plains project. The fragmented phrases – responses to Lucier’s questions to people she met during the three years she spent shooting in North Dakota – are isolated, repeated, and arranged in a sequence that depends on the viewer’s choices and position, so that they become a kind of vernacular prose-poem. Their matter-of-fact acuity sets the tone for Lucier’s deeply moving, disquieting work, a multivalent layering of images and sound that is at once a dispassionate record and an expressive transformation of acute observations, simultaneously homage and elegy.