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Installation Art

Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) (Capsule Review)

Laura Hess

• 1 min read
Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) (Capsule Review)
In the center of the image is a small tube television sitting atop a glass pedestal. There’s a verdant vista on its screen. The room surrounding it is dark, with an eerie, purple light emitting from the back of the TV. That light illuminates a back wall, which looks like a rocky face or the inside of a cave.
Photo: Laura Hess

[Original publication: No Proscenium, 5/18/21]

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A multimedia presentation, Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) is a “creative re-imagination” of the Scottish island. Part of an ongoing, location-based series by local studio Arthur King, the installation includes a mix of field recordings arranged in peculiar formations.

The videos are dominated by pastoral serenity, but the full installation experience is disarming. Reminiscent of greenhouses, a row of small rooms are fronted with glass. Each room contains a single television on a pedestal and against a backdrop of constructed, industrial-like crags. In the central space, a large projection dominates one wall and a separate room includes another collection of videos, played on a grid of rotating discs.

The entire installation is a disembodied version of our natural landscape. Like a cross sectional study of Eigg’s habitat, animal and plant species are spliced onto slides (in this case onto screens) to be experienced separately, together. The result is an unnerving dissonance. The harmony we take for granted is disrupted, rearranged out of sequence and out of alignment. With audio tracks layered over one another, the sweet bleating of lambs becomes grating and haunting; wind gusts and bird caws begin to feel ominous.

Incorporating the work of American psychologist James Hillman, Arthur King cites the relationship between its Changing Landscapes series and depth psychological dream work, in which “the dream is pulled apart, even violated.” Indeed, the installation feels like a vivid dream dissected and, as time passes, it feels impossible to reclaim what the dream was in the first place. It’s a surreal sensation and worth experiencing.