Doug Aitken - New Ocean : Thaw

The Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is pleased to announce the presentation of New Ocean: thaw, an immersive installation by American artist Doug Aitken. This presentation, part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” programme showcasing previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton Tokyo, München, Venezia, Beijing and Seoul, carries out the Fondation’s intent to realize international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

Doug Aitken initially studied magazine illustration; the video production that he developed beginning in the mid-1990s is largely inspired by pop imagery. Human figures, central of many of his short films and installations, contribute to the composition of a flow and of a broad setting. Landscape, another of the artist’s favourite subjects, tends towards a new kind of naturalism. Supported by his mastery of technology, entertainment and communication codes, Aitken’s work seeks to describe an ‘invisible landscape’: one profoundly affected by transits, magnetic variations, information and frequencies.

In New Ocean: thaw (2001), Doug Aitken offers a kaleidoscopic flurry of images on the brink of abstraction: views of Alaska, its sky, and its melting glaciers. The work, which nears romantic sentiment in its relation to the immensity of nature, reflects the 19th-century panorama through its projection format (a double installation of three screens practically forming a half-circle). However, it is at the dawn of the 21st century, marked by ecological catastrophes, that the artist is taking a new look at the poetry of vastness. Both a fixed image (ice) and a moving one (water), the work creates a friction, through the energy of continuous change and entropic transformations of the landscape. The sun is broken down and scattered in a chromatic distortion resulting light flares, while the sounds of the glacier are edited into a mix with electronic sounds.

New Ocean: thaw is distinctly marked by the architecture of screens in our environment and, by editing and sound, the artist goes beyond a simple framework to address underlying perceptive notions. His films bear the traces of experimental 20th-century avant-garde filmmaking and the idea of a broader approach that goes beyond narration and representation. Aitken's images attain a near-physical sensory quality that exceed the boundaries of simple visual perception.