Doug Aitken’s creative vision is just too expansive for a gallery wall. So he’s taking it to the streets. In January, the video artist – whose installations won top honors at the 48th Venice Biennale and were displayed at two Whitney Biennials – debuts his latest flick, Sleepwalkers, on the facades of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Fragments of Aitken’s non-linear film, an ambitious medita-tion on city living, will be projected simul-taneously across seven exterior walls. The work tracks five fictional New Yorkers: A midtown executive, a mail sorter, a billboard tech-nician, a subway drummer, and a Wall Street trader. Aitken filmed his actors (including Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, and singer-songwriter Cat Power) in hidden subway tunnels, behind Times Square signs, and atop iconic sky-scrapers in Rockefeller Center. As the characters go about their daily routines, their lives occasionally synchronize and overlap into the shared experience of urban existence. As Aitken puts it, “It’s like chaos theory – finding order in this very kaleidoscopic new world we’re living in, the quiet moments of harmony before things fall back into randomness.”
– Janelle Brown
credit Frederick Charles Creative Time; Rendering: Doug Aitken
Multimedia artist Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers will be projected on the facades of two New York museums from January 6 to February 12.
credit Frederick Charles Creative Time; Rendering: Doug Aitken
Multimedia artist Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers will be projected on the facades of two New York museums from January 6 to February 12.
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Tales of the City
