No Place Like Home - North Dakota Museum of Art, Grank Forks, North Dakota

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Melinda Barlow

Long concerned with domestic structures and their loss, Mary Lucier documents the aftermath of the 1997 Red River Flood in her most recent video-and-sound installation. The result: a multimedia oratorio by and for the survivors.

Walking into Mary Lucier's latest video-and-audio installation, Floodsongs, is like suddenly being plunged deep underwater, a sensation here created largely through sound. A densely textured wave of voices, muted, reverberant, barely intelligible, rises and falls throughout the gallery, swelling and breaking to a rhythm all its own. Issuing from loudspeakers placed beneath six monitors displaying video portraits of seven survivors of the Red River Flood of 1997, this hypnotic soundscape weaves together those people's spoken memories of living along the river during and after the disaster. Mixed with a background layer of voices that have been electronically processed so that the intelligibility of individual words is deliberately obscured, this undulating cascade of sound powerfully evokes the feeling of being submerged.

That feeling is intensified by the imagery in the continuous video projection dominating the gallery's far wall. If you happened to enter the installation at the beginning of the 18-minute cycle, you would have seen a lone phantomlike figure disappearing into, then reemerging from, a landscape thick with fog. In a subsequent shot another ghostly figure slips by a window, momentarily reflected in the rain-streaked glass. Perhaps these are the silhouettes of former inhabitants, forced by the river to leave their homes, returning to retrieve what they can of their possessions, wringing out memories from a waterlogged world.

If the images that follow are any indication, not much will be salvageable. In sequence after sequence, the camera obsessively scrutinizes the wreckage as if struggling to comprehend the extent of the damage, room by room, home by home, in a world askew. Overturned sofas, toppled chairs, soggy mattresses, appliances on end--these are the husks of abandoned lives. One can almost smell the mildewed carpets, moldy wallpaper and mud-caked mirrors that the camera inventories. Indeed, Lucier likens these ravaged interiors to the inside of a grave and says that shooting them has permanently altered the way she perceives any domestic scene. For her, rooms are now shadowed always by possible ruin; houses seem less stable than before, more susceptible to loss.

A cluster of real-life household artifacts salvaged from the flood and used in the interviews with the survivors suggests this pared-down vision of domesticity is inseparable from a sense of loss. Along the wall opposite the video projection, suspended from the ceiling at odd angles to one another, are a simple wooden chair, a stool and a bare-bulbed floor lamp--the skeletal remains of a life interrupted by calamity.

In the spring of 1997, the residents of Grand Forks, N.D., all experienced some version of this calamity. After a winter of record snowfall, the Red River, which runs through the city, crested at 54 feet--26 feet above flood stage--rising through storm sewers, pushing through sandbags and causing 52-foot-high dikes to collapse. A famous aerial photograph published in a local newspaper more than a week after the flood reveals a sea of rooftops in strangely glistening waters--a community subsumed by the whelming tide.(1)

When the National Guard asked the residents of Grand Forks to evacuate, they left their homes in droves, either wading or paddling to get to higher ground, and in the process turning their city into a veritable ghost town. It is this eerie emptiness that Lucier's camera records. Throughout her video projection, which serves as the shared memory of the survivors shown in closeup on the monitors, human presence is suggested primarily through absence, though it is sometimes replaced by peculiar new inhabitants. Tacked to trees or perched on the steps of abandoned homes, brightly colored stuffed animals become oddly compelling effigies, which transform yards and stoops into personal shrines. In one striking image, a porch is shown elaborately decorated for Christmas with tinsel, stockings, ornaments and toys. An earlier shot shows the adjacent wall, its boarded window displaying a clown's costume, which stands like a sentinel above the scrawled eulogy, "There's no place like home!"

Twice during the tape, survivors-first a man, then a woman--seem to be mulling over their losses. Shown in exquisite slow-motion closeups that let us examine every nuance of their expressions, each looks up, down and then drifts away, lost in a moment of private reflection. On the six video monitors the other survivors do the same, taking stock of their situation, and, as they pause, they appear to be listening to what the others have to say. If their voices, as Lucier suggests, form a contemporary oratorio, then their faces let us see what it means to remember. And as their memories ebb and flow in the space of the installation, words occasionally emerge, barely becoming audible before they are washed away.