CHRIS WILDER: Falls The Night

Kim Light /LightBox is pleased to present FALLS THE NIGHT, a video and photographic installation by Los Angeles-based artist Chris Wilder. Wilder's work explores instances of the intersection of sublimity and decay. FALLS THE NIGHT assembles a poetics of the dusk and the dawn, touching on the associations between waxing and waning and living and dying that are inherent in the transition from day into night, night into day.

The installation's projected video image offers a static shot of the sun setting, in real time, over a sea whose tides roll in towards silhouettes of palms, in calm and regular rhythms. Though at first glance, the video's generic sunset-on-the-ocean image has all the trappings of a tourist snapshot, Wilder unhinges these tropes and creates an experience that is far more absorbing. The resolution of the video footage has been degraded in post-production to effect a painterly flattening of the moving image, and a keying-up of the colors that a video camera uses to reconstitute the visual world--red, blue, and green. And as the sunset progresses, a blush of purple and pink video artifacts circulates through the sky, the water, and the fronds; achieving a level of artificiality in the image that erodes the primacy of representation.

The sun, itself, is masked (and it's progress measured) by a mysterious black dot layered into the video. As a meditative, durational experience, a complex of emotions attend this setting sun. The coming of the night produces sublime sensations of entrancement, loss, anticipation; an anxiety about the abyssal darkness of night, which is tied to mortality. This ominous experience of the dusk is made more explicit by the accompanying soundtrack. Among a cycle of songs whose lyrics are embedded with metaphors comparing the setting sun and the waning of life, Taps is the key to the metaphor, here: a traditional U.S. military bugle song used as both a daily marker of time (at "lights out") and as a mournful ritual element at funerals.

Yet between the pop songs and underneath the mournful bugle track, there are audible calls of birds and insect songs; the sounds of people and of animals still thriving in the dying of the light. The photographic prints in Wilder's installation document an urgent affirmation of life, bearing witness to the effusive overnight blooming of the elusive and mysterious Queen of the Night flower. The Selenicereus grandiflorus blossoms in these photographs will not open until midnight, and by morning they will have died. FALLS THE NIGHT offers two halves of an endless equation, where the cycles of the night and of the day represent a relationship of commonality: they both eradicate and reincarnate one another.

Wilder lives and works in Santa Monica, California, and holds a degree from California Institute of the Arts. He works in video, installation, sculpture, painting, photography and performance media; and his work has been exhibited extensively in numerous private and public venues, including at the Sydney Opera House, the Foundation Cartier in Paris, the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, the Orange County Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia, and the University of Queensland in Australia.