Wood, polished stainless steel
78 inches by 78 inches by 7 inches
Imagine the roar of the stadium on Game Day: the commanding cheer of the fans as their voices blend into one unified rumble; the thunderous stomping of feet quaking and vibrating the core of the building and reverberating outward; the crowd filling every possible space around the field, the epicenter of excitement and vitality.
Like a ground broken open by an earthquake, the surface of Doug Aitken’s Terra (camouflage) splinters out from the center in energetic white fault lines. As soon as you look at the mirrored stainless steel of the piece, you become a part of it. Your reflection is broken up and repeated like a living kaleidoscope or a crowd made up entirely of you. The mirrored surface both plays with and hides within its surroundings by constantly shifting and changing in response to the light and the movement around it.
Doug Aitken is an American multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Defying definitions of genre, his body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance. Aitken often plays with architectural elements and interactive media, such as video and mirrors, to create unexpected narratives. He uses these elements to make living works that play with the world around them, allowing viewers to perform within them, and challenging our preconceived notions of subjects like language, nature, and life cycles.