GRAND FORKS, NORTH DAKOTA.- The North Dakota Museum of Art (NDMOA) recently opened of a new project series, The Emptying Out of the Great Plains, with a newly commissioned video installation by acclaimed New York-based media artist Mary Lucier. Entitled The Plains of Sweet Regret, this five-channel video installation will be on view through June 20, 2004 and will explore the seismic demographic shifts on the Northern Great Plains which are forever changing the rural, social and psychological landscape of this region.

As part of its mission to record the memory of a land that profoundly bears the American identity, the North Dakota Museum of Art has invited five artists over several years to create new works to document or reflect upon the greatest migration from this region since the Great Depression. In this land, where nearly every county is losing population, entire layers of the pioneering traditions that have built this American region are shrinking: the family farm is rapidly disappearing, small towns are fading away, and whole ways of life will soon be gone forever. This project of the NDMOA stands as a way to enroll the evocative and healing power of art but also as a way to explore in a more human and meditative way the cold data of the last population census which took place in 2000. Artists involved in this project include video artist Mary Lucier, photographers Jim Dow, Robert Polidori, Jon Solinger, and documentary filmmaker Kathryn Lipke.

Mary Lucier’s 18 minute installation, entitled The Plains of Sweet Regret, will occupy one large gallery in the museum, using four-channel video projections, two plasma screens, surround sound, and various rescued objects and artifacts to create a specific experience of the Great Plains. The work will reflect upon a personal journey through this region during various seasons, primarily in the heart of North Dakota where the decline of rural life and the creation of ghost towns are most apparent. The installation will start with texts that reflect the words and thoughts of the local population, as a way to introduce what is either lost or at stake. Further along in the piece, images of the villages and abandoned houses will dissolve and fade into the faces of individuals who continue to keep alive the traditions and businesses of their land. By observing, listening to, recording and reflecting upon this reality, the viewer embarks on a discovery of a land of “tough climate, big farms, small towns, good hearts, wary hearts”, according to one of the locals that Mary Lucier met on her journey. The characters in this are both real people and the elements themselves––the severe winter landscapes and the vast spaces, the languid melancholy of the domestic and industrial remains, all contrasted with the vitality of the farm and the rodeo. Within the 360 degree installation, the viewer will become actively engaged with the contradictions of fecundity and decline, abundance and hardship, beauty and cruelty embodied in rural life, and the moment of its passing.

The Plains Of Sweet Regret constitutes the second contribution of Mary Lucier to the social history of the North Dakota region. In 1998, Lucier completed her first commission for the NDMOA entitled Floodsongs. In this work, she examined the aftermath of the 1997 flood of the Red River of the North as it devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota, the home of the Museum.

Floodsongs opened at the North Dakota Museum of Art in December 1998, and later at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in March 1999. The International Art Critics Association voted it the Best 1998-99 Video Exhibition in a US Museum.

The production of the The Plains of Sweet Regret has been funded by Creative Capital, The Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibition, organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art, is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the City of Grand Forks. It will be presented along with Jim Dow’s photographs, as the first part of The Emptying Out Of The Great Plains project.

Mary Lucier is an internationally-acclaimed video artist. She was born in Bucyrus, Ohio, in 1944 and attended Brandeis University where she received a BA with Honors in 1965. She has lived and worked in New York since 1974. Even though she has worked in several media including sculpture, photography and performance, her primary interest typically has been with her work in video and installation, which she combines. Her work has been shown internationally and is represented in many public and private collections. Her video installations were among the first to be acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mary Lucier has received many awards, grants and commissions from public and private foundations.