Dust to Mountain
2016
Video installation with fabric
2 minutes 50 seconds, looped



VIDEO STILLS




INSTALLED AT COMMONWEALTH AND COUNCIL, LOS ANGELES, AND FRIEZE LONDON

Dust_to_Mountain_INSTALL_CC_2.jpg



ARTIST NOTE

The video shows the artist seemingly conjuring a mountain from dust, absurdly and perhaps futilely kicking first dust, then gravel, pebbles, large rocks, huge boulders, all the way up to an entire mountain. Two stories are relevant to her performance: the artist grew up with her Jain family’s prohibition against kicking stones in order to avoid sowing seeds of aggression in our minds, our relationships, and the world; and Samuel Johnson's famous refutation of George Bishop Berkeley's esse est percipi idealism by kicking an unmovable rock and declaring, I refute it thus.

The sheer curtain pictures a landscape supply company's stone yard where the artist’s performance was filmed. This pairing explores via inversions and reversals the reorganization of natural material by cultural forces. A poetic exploration of the philosophical tug-of-war between idealism and materialism, and the interconnectedness of the geological, cosmological and the human, is encapsulated in two catchphrases: loner poet Emily Dickinson’s the brain is wider than the sky, in one fell swoop encompassing the world in one’s imagination, is countered by environmentalist Aldo Leopold’s thinking like a mountain, a phrase famed for extolling slow interconnectedness from his eponymous note. The diaphanous imagery on the curtain places the sky at one’s feet as well as pictures the inverted mountain at the height of the viewer’s head, site of their intellect and vision.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

Video installation shown both in Stone Breath Mountain Dust (solo exhibition with Project 88, 2016) and Liberty Matter (solo exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, 2017).



CREDITS

Video Credits: Cinematographers: Byron Shah, Charlie Balch | Sound Engineer: Mark Gergis | Thank you for Southwest Boulder and Stone, CA

Photo credits: Ruben Diaz and Andy Keate


RELATED WORKS

Stone Breath Mountain Dust, 2016
Liberty Matter, 2017 (featuring Insurrection, 2017 and A Stone’s Throw, 2017)
Ahimsa series, 2020
The Weight of the Cave, 2021
Uncertain Allies, 2021
Strata Bouquet, 2021
Porous Earth, 2024
and more