Mary Lucier
The Plains of Sweet Regret
The Lab Belmar

By: Randy Brown

"Life is about moments, every one of them unique."

Ok, so here's the deal, I am not here to write about the technical, and historical pieces of this installation, the cameras, the grants, who commissioned it...not in to it, many other writers have imparted that information, tech, tech, tech. Art is about guts, heart, and expansion, so here you are going to get my take on that.

Walking in to The Lab from a crushingly sunny day up the stairs, past the still unread artist statement, and finally seated at a school desk (of course right handed), irises slowly adjusting to the mostly darkened room just as The Plains of Sweet Regret begins its exploration into the profundity of ranch and farm culture in the twenty first century. I am struck at the expansiveness of the high plains/great plains and it's seemingly evaporating culture.

Photographed from a car as images moving in opposing directions, a slightly out of register town, ranch house, playground, seem almost ghostlike and shadowy as multiple layers criss-cross in front of me and in my imagination before four large wall hung screens juxtaposed by two smaller floor mounted ones forming an axis in the rooms center(shit, some technical info, sorry).

There is no mistake here, this is about life slowed down and the contradictions of our perceptions of life in rural-ality and just what that is. Slow to me is not slow to a rancher working stock, a rodeo cowboy wrestling a steer to the ground in six seconds that become two minutes before my eyes, snow covered, dirt road split, grasslands rolling into infinity encountering the bumps and valleys of rhythmically lived lives. Expansion and contraction prevail in this dialogue of barns tilted, kaleidoscopic rodeos, grasses high, houses abandoned, lives in transition, the power of slow motion grain falling into the rugged gloved hand of an out of view person as if in some kind of symphonic masterpiece performed to an audience of one. Life is about moments, every one of them unique.

Cowboy hats, horses spinning, broken bowling trophies, books tattered, peeling, cracking wall paper, a smashed floor residing door, seed caps, farm buildings in inexorable earth returning journeys, sun blocking billowing steam, life overlapping and going in two directions at once, regeneration, as a still wet newborn calf stares intently at its mother in some kind of universal recognition that life will continue and that the great plains may not empty out, more like thinned out as families still live here and are much more than mere characters in this poetic suite of time in balance.

Perhaps an omission is an acknowledgement of the native cultures that have thrived here for centuries, the original human resonance of the great plains before the invasion of white Europeans. Sadly another slight in the tragedy of a previous cultural thinning in this vast region. To be sure, Native Americans and their sacred connection to the land are here in vastly reduced numbers amongst the rivers, grasses, aging cottonwoods, small towns, and reservations, but they remain discounted and invisible to this artwork as they are to most Americans.