Installation Views of commissioned video art for the Indianapolis Airport Authority,
Main Terminal Escalators, Indianapolis International Airport, Indianapolis, IN
Exhibited: July 1-December 31, 2014
Description of the Exhibition:
I exhibited two one-minute video works entitled Approach and Gray Wing at the Indianapolis International Airport from July 1-December 31, 2014. The panoramic videos respond to the immediate surroundings of the airport grounds as well as the concept of flight as it relates to one’s personal experience. I spent many days over between 2013-2014 filming on the airport grounds and within the terminal itself. As someone who started traveling on airplanes early as a child, I have long felt a connection to the liberty and transcendence that traveling on airplanes brings to the individual. In the aiport's press release I stated that, “it is truly an amazing experience to be able to look out of a window at 30,000 feet and see the world below. But it is also one that most of us just deem as ordinary in our modern lives.” Following this line of thought, I am also interested in the disconnect that occurs between time and space as we travel through the modern architecture of airports. It is often a beautiful but dehumanizing experience to walk through an airport. It is a transient place, often inspiring and spacious but not one where you can easily imagining existing permanently.
Prior to this commission, Petranek exhibited the video work Turbulence (2008), which explored flight as both a human triumph and tenuous grip over the forces of nature. The goal of this commission was to generate a series of videos that provided a new encounter of the airport and air travel for individuals that visit Indianapolis by plane. Ideas of transience, technology, constructed space, and viewing the airport from a removed and privileged position are all of particular interest in this project.
Approach (1 minute, single channel HD video, 2014) uses repitition to relate the awe of seeing a 747 aircraft land in close range. The footage is slowed down to emphasis how large aircraft appear to defy the laws of physics during landing. Such a large aircraft with such immense weight going so slow can seem more like a visual illusion than real life. There is a simultaneous beauty and overwhelming intensity to such man made machines that I try to convey here. Gray Wing explores the magic of defying gravity from the perspectives of the traveler, mirroring the desent to the ground during a foggy morning flight.
The International Indianapolis Airport graciously made the exhibition of these video works possible. This work was supported in part by IUPUI’s Art and Humanities Institute.