.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I have restlessness with the way a photograph captures time. It's fascinating to me, yet I feel I want something more from the formalism of the medium itself. The static quality of the 'frozen' image or 'decisive moment' is not enough. I want non-decisive moments, inactions, what has happened before or what is to come. I would like to smash a photograph, open it and see what's inside. Maybe then this so-called 'frozen' time could expand and contract. In that sense images are like liquids’
(D. Aitken, interview with A. Sharp, quoted in Doug Aitken, London, 2001, pp. 23-24)
Rising to international prominence at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) with a multi-screen video environment, electric earth, Doug Aitken is a Los Angeles based artist whose multi-media practice immerses the viewer in hypnotic, mesmerising atmospheres, where locations, activities and the flow of time are presented in surprising ways by highly skilful editing of images. the inextinguishable II (1999) is a fascinating work that depicts a vast, silent nocturnal cityscape, disconnected from conventional time and space, delineated by three electricity lines. The view is at once a pristine, utopian vision and a disarming parable of cosmopolitan existence. Similar to his films, Aitken's photograph demonstrates the artist's ability to invoke drama and mood with lighting. With the isolation of the city in the distance, the inextinguishable II mimics the tradition of the landscape painting, reinterpreted for a contemporary era. Operating at the forefront of innovative artistic practices, Aitken’s practice features the division between the urban and organic and mines landscape and photography for new meaning.
(D. Aitken, interview with A. Sharp, quoted in Doug Aitken, London, 2001, pp. 23-24)
Rising to international prominence at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) with a multi-screen video environment, electric earth, Doug Aitken is a Los Angeles based artist whose multi-media practice immerses the viewer in hypnotic, mesmerising atmospheres, where locations, activities and the flow of time are presented in surprising ways by highly skilful editing of images. the inextinguishable II (1999) is a fascinating work that depicts a vast, silent nocturnal cityscape, disconnected from conventional time and space, delineated by three electricity lines. The view is at once a pristine, utopian vision and a disarming parable of cosmopolitan existence. Similar to his films, Aitken's photograph demonstrates the artist's ability to invoke drama and mood with lighting. With the isolation of the city in the distance, the inextinguishable II mimics the tradition of the landscape painting, reinterpreted for a contemporary era. Operating at the forefront of innovative artistic practices, Aitken’s practice features the division between the urban and organic and mines landscape and photography for new meaning.