Doug Aitken: migration (empire)

_{August 28, 2010 – November 28, 2010
Screened from dusk to 11:00 p.m. every day}

For much of the fall, Doug Aitken’s monumental video installation, migration (empire) (2008), will be on view in front of the Art Museum, framed by a bank of trees and the façade of McCormick Hall. The installation affords an exciting opportunity to view Aitken’s stately, mesmerizing video while the campus is at its most beautiful, during the height of the fall season. Based in Los Angeles, Aitken is one of the most prominent video artists working today. Migration reflects poignantly on the experience of migration, a subject steeped in American history. Deeply allegorical, the video pairs footage of industrial and postindustrial landscapes with a series of surreal scenes featuring a host of migratory animals, among them a horse, bison, mountain lion, beaver, and owl. Confined temporarily in banal, rather seedy motel rooms, the animals are clearly out of place, while the motels themselves are paradigmatic non-places. Neither home nor office, motels facilitate the very experiences they now symbolize: transience, passage, escape, and freedom, but also alienation and isolation. At Princeton, the video will be projected onto a custom-designed billboard, calling to mind the highways that gave birth to the motel in the first place. A recent addition to the Museum’s collection, migration joins many other examples of contemporary video.