Pipilotti Rist

From her early music-video-style works to her later immersive projection environments, Rist’s unique artistic vocabulary is rooted in popular culture, technology, and historical feminist video art. Ever Is Over All is one of Rist’s first large-scale installations, giving spatial dimension to her lush visual language, which often combines imagery suggestive of female sexuality with enhanced images of nature and the everyday to create hypersaturated worlds that are part reality, part fantasy. Shot in a single take using consumer-grade video cameras, the work emphasizes the painterly qualities of standard-definition video, in which the pixels or “color noise” that compose the image are visible.

Here Rist transforms a destructive impulse into a hopeful, cathartic gesture. Accompanied by a dreamy musical soundtrack, the installation consists of two overlapping video projections. At left a woman proudly strides down a city sidewalk. She carries a tall flower of a variety that is also seen in the projection at right, which depicts a field of the large tropical blooms. Both videos have been slowed to a hypnotic pace, creating a sense of calm that is periodically disrupted when, in an inexplicable burst of violence, the protagonist forcefully swings the flower at the window of a parked car, which shatters dramatically; in a poetic use of magical realism, the flower is a weapon strong enough to break glass. Meanwhile, an approaching female police officer smiles and salutes her in approval.

Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. In one a roving camera focuses on red flowers in a field of lush vegetation. The spellbinding lull this imagery creates harmonizes with the projection to its left, which features a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries. As the vandal gains momentum with each gleeful strike of her wand, an approaching police officer smiles in approval, introducing comic tension into this whimsical and anarchistic scene.