Film Screening: Tacita Dean—The Green Ray
Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 12:10pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
FREE! Gallery open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.
Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 12:10pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
FREE! Gallery open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.
Friday, November 13, 2020 at 12:10pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
FREE! Gallery open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.
As part of the exhibition A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery is hosting three rare cinematic screenings of Tacita Dean’s 16mm film The Green Ray.
“When the sun sets into a clear crisp horizon, and when there is no land in front of you for a few hundred miles, and no distant moisture that could become, at the final moment, a backlit cloud that obscures the opportunity, you stand a very good chance of seeing the green ray.” Tacita Dean wrote an eponymous essay published in her Seven Books, Selected Writings about this rarely sighted celestial phenomenon. The green ray is the slowest setting ray of the sun which briefly streaks across the horizon before the descent of darkness. Filmed off the west coast of Madagascar, Tacita Dean’s The Green Ray (2001) is a visualization of patience, the evanescence of time, and belief. Referencing 19th century Romantic notions of the green ray and its powers to heighten a viewer’s perception of the world in addition to being an omen of transformation, Dean’s film engages with a multitude of cultural references which invoke the green ray as a symbol of hope, including Eric Rohmer’s 1986 film Le Rayon Vert, Jules Verne’s 1882 novel The Green Ray, and the central sculpture of the exhibition A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Son et lumiere (1990). As Dean writes, her quest to see and film the green ray becomes an act of faith and the film reflects an ongoing desire through human history to document fleeting moments of time as shared emblems of change and hope. Ultimately, the artist is only able to attempt to capture what she “could not imagine” by placing her belief in the power of celluloid film and her own ability to truly look into the horizon.
Read more about "The Green Ray" on the A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS exhibition website.
Film still detail:
Tacita Dean
The Green Ray, 2001
16mm colour film, mute, 2-1/2 minutes
Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris.
Copyright: Tacita Dean
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