earticle

영어

Charles Stankievech’s 2011 installation LOVELAND includes a wall-sized screen depicting video footage of a barren arctic landscape in an enclose room, painted and bathed in white light, that appears as an extension of the imaged environment. A melodic and industrial musical score emanates from multiple sound panels and as the music increases a cloud of purple smoke becomes visible on the horizon line in the distance and gradually advances toward the viewer until it completely fills the screen. The smoke then remains, rushing about madly and lapping at the border between the screen and the room before it suddenly subsides and the spectator is again left with the desolate landscape. The entire process takes a mere five minutes and then, fixed on an endless loop, begins again. This paper positions LOVELAND as an attempt to simulate a sublime experience of the end of the world through a transposition of the Arctic atmosphere into the gallery space. Encompassing a discussion of the historical and contemporary significance of the Arctic in popular culture, aesthetics and environmental politics, it is suggested that Stankievech employs an apocalyptic trope in reference to the unstable position of the North in the current political and ecological climate. Revisiting critiques of modernist exhibition practices and investigating the perceptual and temporal dimensions of the work, this analysis focuses primarily on the experience of the installation’s spectator. Visually, aurally and phenomenologically immersed, the viewer is made subject to, and implicated in, the events unfolding on the screen and within the space. Due to the looping of the video footage, this paper argues that the apocalypse imaged in LOVELAND is presented as an endless event – incessantly enacted, yet infinitely deferred – and that the spectator is enveloped in an uncertain and unceasingly extended present moment.