Beaufort 8: LOVELAND, 2009

Charles Stankievech - Okotoks & Toronto, Canada

Video Installation

LOVELAND is part of an ongoing series of “fieldworks” looking at remote outpost architecture, military infrastructure, the embedded landscape, and chemical warfare. It draws conceptual ties to Instant Loveland, a monumental 1968 purple colour-field painting by American artist Jules Olitski and a 1901 science-fiction dystopia titled The Purple Cloud. The video depicts an empty arctic landscape that gradually fills with purple smoke from a military grenade. On a seamless loop, it alternates the vast blinding white glare of the arctic with the smothering effect of the purple smoke screen, moving slowly toward, and then rushing past, the viewer with visceral effect. Shot on the Bering Sea—a site of increasing international contention over massive oil reserves—LOVELAND draws meaningful if cautionary connections between environmental extremes and complex fantasies.

Charles Stankievech's diverse projects explore the notion of "fieldwork" in the embedded landscape, the military industrial complex, and the history of technology. He has exhibited internationally at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; NGBK + HKW, both in Berlin; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Documenta 13, Kassel; the 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture and, most recently, at SITElines Santa Fe and TBA21, Vienna. Stankievech teaches at the University of Toronto and is co-director of K. Verlag | Press in Berlin.

Learn More

www.stankievech.net/projects/LOVELAND/

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33 Harbour Square (Located on the pedestrian ramp.)

This project is outdoors.