This summer,
Creative Time launches New York's first public art quadrennial, PLOT, with
The World & Nearer Ones, an exhibition on Governors Island featuring 19 individual artists and artist collectives from nine different countries. Minutes away from Manhattan and Brooklyn by ferry, Governors Island in New York Harbor was home to the US military for more than 200 years, but now its fortresses, officer's houses, chapel, theater, and other sites hold contemporary art. Exhibition curator Mark Beasley divides the work, which engages the island's history and future, between indoor and outdoor locales — making the discovery of the artists' projects an adventure.
Light and sound are popular mediums for several of the featured artists.
Anthony McCall uses video projectors and haze machines to construct parallel sculptures that move slowly through the darkened Saint Cornelius Chapel and eventually, almost imperceptibly, trade places with one another.
Krzysztof Wodiczko presents a video installation — deep in a dark, dank munitions room in old Fort Jay — of a candle flame that flickers with the voices of soldiers recalling the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Elsewhere,
Susan Philipsz amplifies sound from an outdoor speaker, singing "By My Side" from the musical
Godspell, asking, "Where are you going? Can you take me with you?" of the not-so-distant Statue of Liberty.
Judi Werthein incorporates another symbol of American patriotism, the national anthem, into the two-channel video installation
La Tierra de los Libres (The Land of the Free), which captures two views of Columbian refugees singing their own lively version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Adam Chodzko tackles patriotism, or at least duty, with his video installation
Echo; presented in the ballroom of the former Officer's Club, it mixes tales of a swapping game, which "military brats" supposedly played, with imaginary reflections by current staff and both newly shot and found-film footage. Contrastingly,
The Bruce High Quality Foundation satirizes the island's resurgence as an art destination and the current economic death of the art world in
Isle of the Dead, a 19-minute zombie film shot and screened in the abandoned movie theater.
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