Mary Lucier
b. 1944
In her rich exploration of light and landscape as agents of visual perception and memory, both personal and mythic, Mary Lucier reexamines 19th-century art historical and literary traditions through the lens of contemporary technology. Lucier is well known for her contributions to the form of multi-monitor, multi-channel video installation. In her elegant "pictorial-narrative" works, in which video images are set within configurations that she describes as "at once cinematic, sculptural, and theatrical," light and landscape are the essential modes of representation and metaphor. Reinvestigating the American pastoral myth in what she terms "an ironic dialogue between past and present, mundane and poetic, real and ideal," Lucier questions collective memory and identity through an art historical vocabulary. Echoing paradigmatic motifs of 19th-century painting traditions, her metaphoric use of light to signify transcendence and her allusions to the sublime evoke Romantic and Modernist ideals. Ohio at Giverny (1983) is a poetic homage to Monet's Impressionism; Wilderness (1986) refers to the Luminists and the Hudson River School. In Lucier's works, nature is transformed by culture an…
Films