single-channel video installation, black and white, sound, looped
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund in partnership with the New Media Arts Consortium, a collaboration of the art museums at Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Colby College, Middlebury College, Mount Holyoke College, and Skidmore College
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2019.20
Lorna Simpson often encourages viewers to derive meaning from the text and image presented in her work. Cloudscape, void of any text or spoken word, lets sound take center stage. In the film, a lone Black man (performed by artist and musician Terry Adkins) whistles a hymn or spiritual while being enveloped in a cloud of fog. The fog ultimately consumes him completely, obscuring him from view. The video then runs backward and forward on a continuous loop. The tune is a segment of a hymn that Simpson found in a nineteenth-century African American songbook. Through the film, Simpson collapses past and present through Adkins’s performance and plays quite literally with time through the reversal and looping of the video. Cloudscape uses the body as a site of memory, production, and cultural preservation, suggesting that the past cannot disappear completely or permanently.
Recommend keywords
Help us make our collections more accessible by providing keywords to describe this artwork. The BCMA uses the
Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus to
provide consistent keywords. Enter a keyword in the field below and you will be prompted with a list of possible matching AAT preferred terms.
