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Pipilotti Rist,
Sip My Ocean,
1996.
Single-channel video installation, shown using two projectors, with sound, 00:08:00, Dimensions vary with installation.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased with funds contributed by Hugo Boss on the occasion of the Hugo Boss Prize 1998, the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Linda Fischbach, Ronnie Heyman, J. Tomilson Hill, Dakis Jo.
98.5226.
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Since the late 1980s, Pipilotti Rist has produced both large-scale, multi-channel video projections and more intimate video pieces. The hypnotic, often enchanting worlds she creates are inflected by haunting sound tracks and erratic pacing and feature emblematic female subjects who appear at once coquettish and rebellious. A young woman in a little black dress creates a frenzied spectacle in an early work, I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986). In Ever is Over All (1997), a modern-day fable, a woman strolls down the street, swinging a large flower that strikes parked cars and, to her delight, shatters their windows. In Sip My Ocean (1996), the onset of disillusionment in love darkens an aquatic, utopian world. The video is projected in duplicate as mirrored reflections on two adjoining walls, with the corner between them an immobile seam around which psychedelic configurations radiate and swirl. A bikini-clad woman is seen intermittently frolicking underwater, her obvious pleasure and sense of self-containment is transmitted to the viewer as part of a mesmerizing narrative about longing, desire, and dreams of fulfillment. Choreographed to a sound track of the artist alternatively crooning and hysterically shrieking Chris Isaak's song “Wicked Game,” Sip My Ocean disturbs as much as it seduces, leaving one to wonder if there might be trouble in this aquatic paradise. Desire, after all, always demands an “other,” one who may or may not yield to the embrace.
To make strange the viewing experience, Rist often installs her projections in awkward or unusual spaces—squeezing imagery between doors or the folds of a curtain, for instance, or projecting onto floors. In the kaleidoscopic Atmosphere & Instinct (1998), a childlike woman, clad in a Raggedy Ann–style dress and wig, is seen from a bird's-eye view and appears through the leafy treetops. Moving in and out of sight, past suburban homes, swimming pools, and lawn chairs, she looks up and waves her arms with the desire to be seen or perhaps to fly away; the work takes on a melancholic tone when that desire promises to be unfulfilled.
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