Mary Lucier: The Plains of Sweet Regret

Commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art

“At the turn of the twenty-first century, Mary Lucier began to visit North Dakota, traveling across seasons and time, venturing into the far northwest corner of the state, almost to Montana, almost to Saskatchewan. The North Dakota Museum of Art had commissioned her to respond to the population shifts that are forcing the people of the Northern Plains to reimagine their lives. Seismic change has swept away family farms and ranches, small towns and rural schools. The land is now occupied by agri-business with its massive machinery, global positioning systems for precision crop management, worldwide marketing networks, and government safety nets. The lone farmer, the cowboy, crews of custom combiners, migrant workers and field hands gradually move on. The remains of that earlier life dot the landscape. "The Plains of Sweet Regret" is the artist's answer.

Mary Lucier’s eighteen-minute, five-channel video installation employs four video projections, two plasma screens, surround sound, and various rescued objects and artifacts. With these she creates the experience of moving through the landscape, across the Prairies and the Plains, into the birthing pens and the rodeo arenas, and, finally, back into the West of the imagination--the West, which, if it ever existed, lies in ruins.”

"North Dakota, and possibly South Dakota, are among the only states in the Union that are losing population," explains video installation artist Mary Lucier. "That was just brought home in the last census." She pauses to reflect. "[Dakotans] can't make a living there anymore. The young people leave, there's no one to run the farms, agribusiness is in disarray. The towns shut down. There's this great outward migration, to Minneapolis or California and elsewhere. To those who remain, this is tragic." Lucier is describing the genesis of her latest project, "The Plains of Sweet Regret" a video installation work that evokes the grace and quiet grandeur of a way of life that's slipping away.

Born and raised in a small town in Ohio, Lucier has been making video installation art since the early 1970s and is recognized as a pioneer in the field. Mary Lucier has presented numerous solo exhibitions, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the TV Gallery in Moscow, The San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She was also recently featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s American Century, 1950—2000 exhibition as well as Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977. Lucier has won support for her work from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, The American Film Institute, and Anonymous Was a Woman.