migration by Doug Aitken

Screenings and Events / Aurora Award and Gala / Past Honorees / 2009 Doug Aitken / migration by Doug Aitken

migration

Doug Aitken: migration is a work which explores a new modern landscape; the interiors and from the windows of these hotels and motels. As the work progresses, the hotel locations continuously change from sterile Holiday Inns in snow-covered suburbs and desert motels to airport executive hotel suites, then on to someplace else again. We’re taken on a never-ending odyssey through the modern American landscape. The work projects a sense of expansiveness mixed with the repetition of modern dwellings. Each hotel / motel room captures a unique emotion. There is an overriding sense of displacement and emptiness until unexpected inhabitants become gradually revealed in the rooms.Unexpected shapes emerge and take form in the shadowy motel and hotel rooms.

In an empty nondescript hotel room at dusk, a dark silhouette walks past the camera frame. The shape is large and somehow fills the shallow room. We gradually make out the details that reveal it to be a horse, a dark-haired mustang. The horse stands in the hotel room nearly motionless, adjacent to the unused bed. Sheer curtains blow in the breeze and let the filtered light of the setting sun into the room. We focus on the horse’s small movements, its hoof pressing down on the carpet, its tail erratically whisking back and forth. As the sun sets and the room darkens, a flickering grey light of a TV appears to light the room. In a tight view we see the horse’s dark black eye in which the hotel room is reflected. The horses eye suddenly blinks and in it we see the reflection of an image on television screen. Across the room the grainy color television screen comes into view. The flickering grey light of the TV lights the room, on the screen we see a panoramic scene of a large herd of wild mustangs running across the plains.Whereas these beautiful creatures are usually seen from afar, the presence of the large creature in the small room highlights its mass as well as the details of the room. The room suddenly seems deficient, unable to contain this animal. We hesitate as feelings of reverence and admiration mix with fear and trepidation.It’s in this way that the work gradually grows from the emptiness of the hotels and motels and builds to create something at once familiar, unique and alien. Gradually different migratory birds and other animals appear, always in different hotel rooms, always in different places.Some animals adapt, others seem profoundly alien in their human environments, but in every case it highlights aspects of the building that we so often take for granted. Whether it’s a buffalo knocking lamps over in a small suite or a jackrabbit picking at the weave of a bedspread, the visitors are colliding with our most common environmental materials and using them in a way that’s as normal to them as it is foreign to us. Each creature is seen as a vignette, a small encounter that clashes the organic and the artificial, the natural and the modern. In “migration” humans never appear; the work is set in a world that is mysteriously post-human. The architecture of humanity houses this new habitat for creatures, which are mysteriously displaced.

Doug Aitken: migration is a deeply American artwork from the choice of indigenous animals and birds from the Americas to the hotels/motels and the emotion of the landscape itself.The choice of motels/hotels will capture a diverse range of destinations from independent roadside hotels to chains such as Holiday Inns, Ramadas or Marriots. The work will appear to span a vast landscape from the open west to the postindustrial east as framed from the aperture of hotel room windows and in the details of the rooms themselves. This is the new American landscape, where hotels become a never-ending circuit of near-sameness allowing one to catapult from city to city, crossing distance yet often never sensing change. Hotels as dwellings offer both security and isolation in this sameness. In migration these indigenous American creatures inhabit these hotels and motels designed to be transitional spaces for humans, yet with the humans absent, the migratory patterns of the animals become superimposed onto them, becoming the new occupants. We watch as mammals and birds occupy and adapt to these modern synthetic environments, at times making them their own while at other moments standing in reflected silence.

migration previously exhibited at 303 gallery in New York City from September 20 - November 1, 2008.