The first work I saw by Janet Biggs was a video installation entitled Water Training (1997), which combines footage of a horse forced to tread water, underwater scenes of young synchronized swimmers, and imagery shot from the bow of a ship gliding toward a glacier. The work’s visceral juxtapositions of fear and vitality, chaos and tranquility, stuck with me for a long time. Since then I’ve watched the artist’s desire to expose what it takes to stay afloat and thrive amid extreme conditions lead her to some very far-flung places like East Java, where she captured sulfur miners working inside active volcanoes, and western China, where she traveled with Uyghurs on camelback.
Themes of risk and endurance have also found expression in her collaborations with a wide range of performers, from the vision-impaired dancer Davian Robinson and self-described amputee drummer Jason Barnes to neuroscientists, aerospace engineers, and astrophysicists. Biggs’s practice has increasingly focused on the ways science, art, memory, and technology intersect with place, and her current show at Cristin Tierney Gallery exemplifies this. We sat down to talk about the two video pieces that comprise it and why they center the total solar eclipse—that bewitching celestial event when the moon consumes the sun and day turns to night.
