The Brooklyn Rail

Eclipse (Amazon, September 7, 1858) is a three-channel video installation that is Janet Biggs’s most recent project. Visually ravishing and ambitious, it plunges us into the rainforests of the Amazon and Costa Rica. We enter bouldered, densely foliated pathways and pass by glinting rivers colonnaded by pillars of falling water. We glide by astonishingly beautiful flora and fauna (strangler figs, cecropia, ferns; howler monkeys, green macaws, and much more, the region among the most biodiverse in the world). Biggs takes us across precariously swaying rope bridges that stretch over deep chasms, as well as above and below the cloud line, enveloped by the saturated greens of trees that, at times, form a kind of cathedral, spatial sound adding a further illusional dimension, deepening our sense of immersion.

An interdisciplinary artist, Biggs might also be called a documentary filmmaker (although of a different order), her projects ballasted by reams of meticulous research, working in collaboration not only with other artists but also explorers, scientists, engineers—and a robot. Place is her primary subject and since the early days of her practice, she has regularly journeyed to extreme locations of awe-inspiring grandeur that are daunting geographically and politically. She has also, as if our planet isn’t challenging enough, participated in simulations beyond it as a crew member at the Mars Desert Research Station and Mars Academy USA.

Biggs’s multilayered, discursive, and idiosyncratic work—her point of view oblique and distinctively her own—is increasingly more personal, an existential quest in the guise of scientific research, which it also is. Eclipse is no exception. The labels that accompany Bigg’s work should be required reading, their content critical to the artist’s intentions and process. We learn in one label that Biggs tracked solar eclipses across Antarctica, the Amazon, and the Utah desert over a four-year period in the hope of connecting to her mother, who died in 2019. Because of Alzheimer’s disease, her mother confused day for night and the reverse in her last years, an inversion called sundowning. Who else but Biggs would see parallels between that and solar eclipses?

The exhibition’s title is taken from an account by Lt J.M. Gillis (who eventually headed the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.) published by the Smithsonian in 1859 that documented the total eclipse of the sun the year before in Peru, commenting on local reactions to it—a rare acknowledgment. A copy of his notes, pictured in the film, is also on view in the vitrine in the adjacent gallery. With it are other artefacts that are part of the story and substantiates it—meteorites, a lovely photograph of Biggs’s mother as a young woman, and a replica of the sextant that Gillis might have used, as well as stills of the other solar eclipses, creating a semblance of the displays found in (traditional) natural history museums. Biggs, however, tinkers with her narratives: some are true, some might not be, some are selectively remembered, others omitted. In another label, Biggs refers to a memory of her grandfather that has long been familial lore, suspecting that it may not be true, but choosing to believe it is.

The three large screens, one per wall and one slightly angled away from it, are set at ground level. The video begins with wind, pelting rain, thunder, and quickly shifts to a bleak, postlapsarian, nearly monochromatic landscape that then explodes into the luxuriant sunlit and shadowed greenery of a tropical paradise, comparable, say, to lofting us from Kansas to the Emerald City. A series of questions pace the film, like chapters in a book: the first one “Do you remember when it shifted / When it all changed?”

We follow in the footsteps of a man who seems to be passing through, an observer, explorer, but also an intruder, an alien presence that is ambiguous, disruptive, the consequences unpredictable, a reference to Gillis, perhaps, to Biggs, to all of us, to inevitable thoughts of climate change, and environmental endangerment and despoliation. She offers, however, another person who appears far more intimate with the rainforest, as if it had miraculously generated him. Moving through the wilderness in a sinuous dance of celebratory, conciliatory grace, Biggs unfolds a complicated, elliptical tale, an allegory of our relationship with the Earth.

Eclipse closes with a song that seems to emanate from the rainforest itself rather than the singer, a tender, lingering coda offered to the mysteries of nature and the spirits of place.