The Symbiotic Blues
Frank Gillette’s world-premiere, nine-channel video study follows woodland and beach environments on Long Island. Riverrun, Spearlight, and Blackseer trace the relationship between the natural world and perception over time through image and sound.
LOS/NR is proud to present a major multi-screen video work by the pioneering American video and installation artist Frank Gillette (b. 1941, Jersey City, NY). Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information. He has been described as a pioneer in video research with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments. Gillette’s seminal work Wipe Cycle (co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1969) is considered as one of the first video installations in art history. Gillette is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Symbiotic Blues is the world premiere of a 9-channel video study of woodland and beach of eastern Long Island. It consists of three video triptychs (Riverrun, Spearlight, and Blackseer) exploring the ways in which we experience the natural world. In nine endless loops, Gillette returns to a subject he has been drawn to for over fifty years; the relationship between the natural world and the ways in which we experience it over time. He achieves this through a complex engagement with classic genres: still-life, landscape, and symbolic abstraction combined with soundtracks mixing natural and electronic sounds. Though the artist was among the first to use television as an artistic medium, his video work has remained rooted in an approach stemming from his early training as an abstract painter. In the artist’s words, “...each triptych combines aesthetic judgment with the forces which shape nature’s boundaries.”