Swamp

Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a survivor and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety.

This film, made by the artist, Robert Smithson, with the assistance of Virgina Dwan, Dwan Gallery & Douglas Christmas, Director, Ace Gallery, (the aforementioned Dwan & Christmas also assisted Smithson financially with the making of the Spiral Jetty), is a poetic and process minded film depicting a "portrait" of his renowned earth work -- The Spiral Jetty, as it juts into the shallows off the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. A voice-over by Smithson reveals the evolution of the Spiral Jetty.

Mono Lake is a document of a unique natural environment, a "home movie" of the artists' 1968 road trip, and an intimate view of three seminal figures in the earth art movement as they interact with the Western landscapes that are so central to their work.

Hotel Palenque, a slideshow of Robert Smithson’s photographs, reveals an unfinished hotel on the Mayan architectural site of Palenque, Mexico.Taken in 1969 during his travels to northern Yucatán, these photographs reveal spatial and architectural uncertainties, transitioning between temporal boundaries of the past and present. This “non-site”, a place lacking purpose, is evidence of a vision not realized and a man-made intervention entropically falling back into the earth.

40 years after the completion of the work 'Broken Circle/Spiral Hill', the film that Robert Smithson was never able to finish due to his untimely death has been completed in collaboration between artist Nancy Holt and SKOR.

n 1964 Robert Smithson made a sculpture called Enantiomorphic Chambers that cleverly exploited our two-eyed nature to haunting metaphysical ends. Stepping between the two chambers, the viewer sees his or her image cancelled out by precisely coordinated mirrors, accomplishing Smithson’s task of “eliminating the consciousness that regulates binary vision.” Curators Kevin Regan and Christopher Howard have teamed up to turn NURTUREart Gallery into an entantiomorphic chamber of their own devising, though with a rather different aesthetic than Smithson’s. Noticing a simple iconographic trend in which a number of contemporary practices make use of reflected images, Regan and Howard have turned this underrecognized phenomenon into a full-scale metaphysical research project, complete with its own blog to document ongoing discoveries.

Partially Buried Woodshed, one of Smithson's iconic works, was executed at Kent State University in Ohio in January 1970. The piece was created by partially burying an empty shed under mounds of dirt with a backhoe until the shed's roof beam collapsed. The physical structure has long since been degraded by weather, vandalism and neglect; it has "gone back to the land," as the artist expected. However, the infamous Kent State shootings in May of 1970, in which National Guardsmen opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four of them, has lent Smithson's entropic monument a peculiar historical resonance as a metaphorical locus of the forces and conflicts of its era.