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All Pieces of a River Shore
Created by silt, in collaboration with Mike Meyers, for the 2003 Whitney Biennial. Inspired by a science fiction short story by R.A. Lafferty, the piece is a cinematic installation performed live by the artists. Traces of birds, reptiles, insects, and plants fossilized onto film are projected into a primordial mosaic, assembled live on kinetic, sculptural screens that float above the audience. Silt uses Lafferty’s story-- describing a panoramic picture, hundreds of miles in length—a scrolling riverscape image of tremendous antiquity and seemingly infinite resolution— as a method of focusing their own paranaturalist inquiry of a Northern California canyon creek. In the performance emphasis is placed on the spatial aspect of the observer and the cinematic event. Screens and objects are revealed through time like ghosts. Images surround the viewer as the phenomenon of space asserts itself; the afterimage stares back. In All Pieces of a River Shore, one is witness to the sensual and imaginative discovery of histories embedded within the immense and the minute patterns of the landscape.
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 2002 (Installation/ performance)