Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016)
By Andrew Norman Wilson
Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles whose videos and installations address a heady rush of images, technology, and bodies caught in the streams of circulation and representation that our era demands. He has recently had work featured in the seventh Bucharest Biennale, the ninth Berlin Biennale, and will have a new video installation as part of the eleventh edition of the Gwangju Biennale, curated by Maria Lind, which opens on September 2, 2016. ODE TO SEEKERS 2012 is a looped video that celebrates mosquitoes, syringes, and oil derricks. Not only are they symbols of some of the most significant threats to human life—mosquito borne illnesses, drug addiction, and the petroleum industry—but they are also the causes of three of my most significant personal traumas. In 2012 I received psychological testing at Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, New York, which had been a pioneer of the “therapeutic suburb” model for mental institutions when it was built in 1927. I realized that a large portion of the campus had become abandoned, and not only hadn’t been cleaned out, but carried a history of sporadic reactivation by junkies, homeless people, teens,…
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