Common Love,
Aesthetics of Becoming
April 27–June 11, 2011
Ronnie Bass
The Sky Needs You Too, 2008
Single-channel video, color, sound
8 min.
Courtesy the artist
The videos of Ronnie Bass reveal a fascination with affirming sincerity and self-realization while facing the banality of daily existence. With New Age mysticism, ambient minimal music scores, and Bass's own intriguing performance as the main character, The Sky Needs You Too depicts an allegorical call and response to nature, layering footage of an ascending horizon over a synth band's performance. Evoking the mystic possibilities of the landscape through tropes of romanticism and utopian possibility, Bass simultaneously cautions against technology as a remedy for the reconstitution of power of humankind over nature.