Animals in motel rooms star in Carnegie's next online exhibition
The Carnegie Museum of Art’s next online exhibition will feature video vignettes of “wild North American migratory animals relocated from their natural habitats to vacant motel rooms.”
Launching Aug. 19, the unusual work is “migration (empire),” a 24-minute video by multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken. The film was exhibited on the museum’s facade in 2008 during “Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International.”
“The work was filmed in roadside motel rooms across the United States, including those in and around Pittsburgh, symbolizing human mobility, progress, and westward expansion,” says exhibition curator Ashley McNelis. “The viewer … is subtly asked to reflect upon our own species’ infringement of the natural environment.”
Scenes include a bison ruffling a bedspread, a beaver swimming in a bathtub and a deer rummaging in a refrigerator.
“With ‘migration,’ I wanted to create a window into the modern landscape. I traveled across the country filming inside different hotel rooms documenting the landscape that we have created. A landscape of repetition. This landscape is a vast system of arteries, and veins, but what was there before?” Aitken says. “I wanted to look at a deeper history, an ecological history, integrating animal species that existed long before the modern world.”
The exhibition is the second installment in an online exhibition series highlighting the Carnegie’s film and video collection. The series launched in May with ”Rachel Rose: Lake Valley.”
“Our online exhibitions allow us to expand access to our moving image collection and engage audiences in new and meaningful ways, no matter where they reside,” says Eric Crosby, the museum’s Henry J. Heinz II Director.
These free online educational programs will accompany “migration (empire)”:
• Conversation between Aitken and Douglas Fogle, curator of the 55th Carnegie International, 5:30 p.m. Aug. 19
• Drawing workshop with a CMOA teaching artist, 7-8 p.m. Oct. 6
• Photo essay by Leah Frances for the museum’s online journal “Storyboard.”
Details: cmoa.org
Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Shirley by email at smcmarlin@triblive.com or via Twitter .
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