Crypts of Civilization

Returning home to working class Warwick, Rhode Island, Peter Latang encounters childhood friend Donald Treebeck for what starts as a simple favor and turns into a long van ride into two friends past.

A surreal travelogue from the molten interior of the Earth to the limits of the known universe, this film, assembled primarily from footage made by government agencies including US Geological Survey, NASA, and Space Force, investigates the paradoxical relationship between militarized technologies of visualization and sublime cosmic phenomenon. Music: ‘Earendel,’ by Patricia Brennan.

Documents a peculiar request by phone, set against a beautiful day at Green-Wood Cemetery. The exchange explores multiple tangents, from parakeets to numerology, while the onscreen events turn bizarrely synchronous.

War Pigeon invokes the use of trained pigeons as aerial photographers during World War II. In this phone call to the customer service department of a bank, the speaker describes an unnerving encounter with a suspicious bird, which has led him to question his trust in the bank’s very existence.

Peter attempts to decode a vision witnessed from a supermarket checkout line while grappling with an assignment to shoot the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: a “final backup” of seed samples from crops around the world, stored within the permafrost of an Arctic mountain.

Asymptomatic Carrier, created for 2003's Frieze Arts Fair NYC, flies over the abandoned North Brother Island in the East River. Wikipedia says "now a bird sanctuary, the island is currently abandoned and off-limits to the public… …from the 1980s through the early 2000s it supported one of the area’s largest nesting colonies of Black-crowned Night Heron. However as of 2011 this species has abandoned the island for unknown reasons."

Frank Heath's "The Hollow Coin" explores roles of authority in public space and the intersection of personal and historical narratives. The video combines documentary footage of New York City's rapidly disappearing network of payphones with audio of a covertly recorded telephone exchange between an actor and an unknowing bystander. In the surreptitiously captured conversation an attempted "information leak" is infused with an absurd story and a historical anecdote. The work's title refers to a Soviet spy who was apprehended in 1953 after mistakenly paying his newspaper delivery boy with a hollow coin that contained a microfilm of an encrypted message. Throughout the video a parallel sequence of events reveals that images from the video itself have been stored on an SD card concealed within a hollow coin and inserted into the payphone from which the call was made.

Two filmmakers, Peter and Dwight, seek props and direction in the aisles of a department store, the words of physicists overseeing the Large Hadron Collider echoing in their heads.

Pondering recent trips through the Suez Canal and to Onkalo, Finland (soon to be the world’s most secure nuclear waste site) a man consults an estate lawyer to discuss an eccentric plan for his mortal remains.

"There is Nothing Underneath the West Virginia Wing" (2018) revolves around Project Greek Island bunker, a vast and elaborate underground bomb shelter that was designed to house members of Congress in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Now declassified and open for public tours, the bunker was covertly maintained for 30 years in a state of readiness beneath the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Heath's video focuses on the eerie spaces of the vacant shelter and its remarkable blast doors which were engineered by the Mosler Vault Company whose bank vaults famously survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

Attempting to stage an historical reenactment on Coney Island, a contractor working for a powerful client speaks with a representative from a rental company regarding the unconventional use of an electric generator.

Protect Your Home (Interpret It Well) opens with another storm system surging behind a rainbow over idyllic grassland, as the ominous vibraphone tingles of Ches Smith’s “Interpret It Well” start up. A medley of images smatter across the screen: YouTube storm chasers, HGTV bulletproof door shills, a cacophony of home protection start-ups, sage, panic rooms, bunker aquaponics. A test house in a warehouse is systematically destroyed by a lab-grown hurricane. The litany quickly grows absurd, and one thinks of others that profit off of fear and anxiety: the wellness industry, arms manufacturers, the prison-industrial complex. When you carry a hammer, everything looks like a nail. [Overview Courtesy of Screen Slate]

Soundtracked by “Combustion 2” from the Cory Smythe album Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (2022), this video was assembled exclusively from film and television programs that feature the eponymous 1933 song written by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. From Judy Garland to Jerry Garcia, Mad Men to The Muppets, the composition has appeared ubiquitous for nearly a century. This case file of disparate specimens spanning across time and genre, linked only by their shared relationship to the song, was collected and processed through an imagined crime lab computer. The resulting montage reveals a chilling and surreal image of retrospective foreshadowing: despite our best efforts, kindling from the dawn of industrial mass production has now grown into a raging inferno. The world burns wildly out of control and yet the party goes on. What may be the last gasp of civilization is reflected through an archival hall of mirrors until the disco ball crashes to the floor, exploding in flames.

Frank Heath

"A Prime Condition" (2017) contrasts the supposedly secure underground storage of film reels in a salt mine in Hutchinson, Kansas, with the obsolescence of DVDs.

"Path of Totality" documents the events leading up to the August 21st 2017 total solar eclipse in St. Joseph, MO (one of the prime locations within the path of the shadow as well as the hometown of the artist). Featuring a colorful array of eclipse-chasers, middle-Americans, and commercial opportunists who descended upon the small town in anticipation for a moment of impending darkness, the work captures the peculiar mixture of anxiety, amusement, and reflection summoned by the cosmic event.