Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, "The Wind," 2024. Single-channel video with sound, 1:17 hours. Video still.
Lenka Clayton
Commission by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
A
collaborative video titled The Wind, created by Lenka Clayton and
her collaborator and husband Phillip Andrew Lewis, is presented in the gallery’s
north video screening area. The Wind is a feature-length film
meticulously constructed from over 1,000 clips featuring wind taken from
hundreds of other movies—from rom-coms
to Westerns, spy dramas, and horror movies. These films were all commercially
produced and come from countries all around the world, creating a sense of a
shared force that we can observe as it travels around the globe.
Wind footage
in films is usually a secondary presence, used to foreshadow imminent, often
ominous, change and provide an emotional or temporal cut. These overlooked
scenes are amassed in The Wind in increasing intensity according
to the Beaufort Wind Scale, from plants that almost imperceptibly quiver to a
tornado that tears a building from its foundations.
Each
clip of wind has its original sound. Sometimes this is the wind itself, but
more often it carries fragments of tone, dialogue, music, or the edge of
dramatic action from its previous context. We look at a cherry orchard through
falling blossoms and hear a blood-curdling scream. We see an uninhabited
farmhouse and hear a car door slam behind us. This seemingly random audio, a
form of concrete poetry, is connected by the repeated visual of the wind, which
increases in force as the film develops. A large-scale projection of The
Wind will be the featured event of the gallery’s holiday party on Saturday, December 13
