at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
“What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.” –Laurie Anderson
“Stories are our weather” –Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose staggering breadth of knowledge, insatiable curiosity, technical virtuosity and conceptual rigor form the basis for her superb exhibit at The Hirshhorn. Simply titled (though not so simple) The Weather, it is billed as an immersive multimedia experimental exhibit, but really it is an otherworldly investigation into what it means to be a human in this twenty-first century. Intensely personal as well as political, it is a revelation, encompassing eerie video projections, kinetic talking sculpture, operatic oil paintings, invented conceptual violins, complex installations, multiple soundscapes, and everywhere words static and moving painted on floors and walls surrounding the viewer. [Read more…]