Sky Meadow Road
Sky Meadow Road
Digital Madeleine, or video-time is never lost or past, Krowswork Gallery, Oakland, 2013
Sky Meadow Road, video installation
Wide continuous horizontal videos of movement through a redwood forest, projected onto three walls of a basement gallery; one finished wall, two walls of raw, rough, old brick. Filling the middle of the space, long wood church pews, for anybody to occupy. In the center of the back pews, and behind them, a thin congregation of human-high striped, bare twigs, catching some of the twinkling light from the video projections. Are these the spirits of a disappeared forest, a forest-to-be, our ancestors come back as trees?
In Majewska’s presentation, Sky Meadow Road, the focus is on nature—adding to a rich history of the contemplation of time through the observation of the natural world. A precisely lit forest grows in the gallery space; we sit or stand among the spindly branches while along the walls pass fast moving images of trees as they meet the sky. The self is physically there but psychically absent, as the impermanence of both the forest and the video recording become a singularity that subsumes any individual thought. Memories of the artist as a girl in her native Poland collapse onto a rural drive through the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. As we observe this linear streaming-by of nature, time seems to come to a stand still and then disappear. Majewska reminds us that even in our digital world, nature remains our temporal guide. – Jasmine Moorhead, Krowswork Gallery
