Since the 1980s, Tony Oursler (b. 1957, New York, NY) has been one the most experimental artists of his generation, consistently redefining installation art and the moving image. Tear of the Cloud is his newest and most extensive site-specific multimedia artwork, with five digital projections superimposed onto the landmarked 69th Street Transfer Bridge Gantry, the surrounding landscape, and the flowing water of the Hudson River itself. These spectral images combine with an evocative soundscape to create a dramatic experience that transforms Riverside Park each night.
Growing up on the banks of the Hudson River sparked Oursler’s fascination with its entwined cultural, technological, and ecological narratives, inspiring him to create an artwork that poetically mines the varied activities of the region. Oursler’s newly filmed footage highlights obscure subjects and popular culture, with performers portraying figures as wide-ranging as the Hudson River School painters, the 19th century utopian community of Oneida, the strong female lead Pearl White of early serial silent cinema created on the Palisades, and the pioneers who developed experimental music in Lower Manhattan and the South Bronx, among others. The exhibition also explores the more doleful stories of Mary Rogers’ infamous murder at Sibyl’s Cave in New Jersey and the dubious legacy of PCB contamination of the waters, as well as a rethinking of the antecedents, origins, and offspring of telecommunication by way of the talking drum, inventor Samuel F.B. Morse’s final painting of his daughter The Muse, IBM’s chess-playing computer Deep Blue, artificial intelligence, and the political agitation of social media bots.
Tear of the Cloud manifests this data by remixing contemporary and historic iconography in a non-linear, associative rereading of official narratives. Oursler’s kaleidoscopic intervention interweaves its roving cast of characters like the many tributaries that feed the Hudson River, offering layered connections and multiple meanings that illuminate our complicated past, encourage us to reflect upon the present, and inspire us to reconsider the future of our environment and culture.
