Lethe/Sky (Day One, Day Two), 2004 Still from video projection. Limited edition DVD, 8 minutes, color, sound. Courtesy Remy Toledo Gallery, New York.
Lethe/Sky (Day One, Day Two), 2004
A large-scale video projection presents an aerial view of the artist lying among hundreds of layers of paper
in a concrete rectangular vessel. The artist moves gradually in a circular way with her eyes closed, outlining her body with crayons held in both of
her hands. At times this action overlaps with a footage shot from an airplane, presenting the view of the Hudson River, through passing clouds. The
overlapping of the intervals of the aerial views both of the artist lying down and the river, creates a sense of suspension between being on the ground
and flying. The project suggests commonality between the surfaces of paper, skin and sky. The artist created the sound through altering and multiplying
fragments of music by the 17th-century composer Lucrezia Vizzana.
"When we fall down, when we fall asleep, the ground ceases to exist in relation to our body. In the space between presence and dream, we gradually succumb.
We don't entirely let it all go, yet we don't really fight the arriving dream either. The camera lens hovers above my body in a vessel the way I hover above
the river in an airplane. My body and my consciousness are gradually suspended, floating in the air similarly to the human voice, in a continuous relation between
dissonance and harmony. The voice enshrouds and connects both the view of body in papers and the view of the earth from the airplane, as both extreme opposites and
closely related physical and mental states." (Monika Weiss)
In Orphism, a Greek mystical religious movement, it was believed that hose who drank from the River Lethe would lose all memory of their past existence.
