Ati Maier’s video “The Placeless Place,” currently on view in “Contact: Local to Global” at the New Mexico Museum of Art, has been mentioned in a recent review in the Santa Fe New Mexican by Michael Abatemarco.
“Ati Maier’s 10-minute, single-channel video The Placeless Place (2016) supports the intention behind the museum’s three current exhibitions, the openings of which were timed to coincide with its centennial in November. Maier’s video seems complementary to the exhibitions’ themes of bridging past, present, and future, and is among the last works you’ll encounter in the show Contact: From Local to Global, tucked at the far end of the museum’s New Wing Gallery.
In The Placeless Place, the figure Maier calls Space Rider — outfitted with a glowing orb for a helmet, dressed like an astronaut, and riding a horse — traverses an urban landscape, ending up in New York City’s Times Square amid throngs of people and flashing neon. At the same time, another screen shows the rider in a barren desert landscape. The juxtaposition seems to hint that the empty landscape is a place to which we’re headed or, perhaps, the place from which we came. The video is cyclical, making it difficult to know if the artist is differentiating between the past and the present or drawing a parallel between them. Though the barren landscape is more natural than its urban counterpart, the terrain nonetheless seems oddly alien. But the rider, a recurring figure in Maier’s work, inhabits both land- and cityscape, moving among the urban crowds in her outer-space uniform like a performance artist. She remains aloof and apart, mounted on her horse, seemingly a visitor from another world.”
Read the full review here.