Sleeping Under Stars, Living Under Satellites closed in June, but the show lives on. The Aldrich has kindly made the exhibition brochure available on their website. And we’ve created a slightly more reader-friendly version of the pdf. Download and enjoy.
The essay by exhibitions director Richard Klein was written before the work was actually installed, but he captures not only our process and the details of our research, but also the key conceptual turn:
The immersive experience that Finley and Muse have created—even though it is connected with specific characters and events—does not have fixed form, a definitive boundary, or a clear beginning or end. The video and audio channels are never presented in exactly the same relationship to each other, and the stories that are told overlap and merge with a landscape that itself constantly changes with the time of day, the weather, and the seasons. Is the primary experience of the exhibition achieved standing in the darkened gallery watching a modern-day magic lantern show, or walking up a hillside, GPS in hand, to find a cleft in the rock that once sheltered a madman? It depends on one’s perspective, and one’s view of what is real and what is not.
Yes, the primary experience should have been (and should be) of the fold that brings these times and spaces and stories together. We hope that the technical, architectural, and geographical means multiply these perspectives, and that the stories themselves, of Sarah Bishop, the Leatherman, and Ridgefield’s celebrants, have a newly complex relation.
