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Doug Aitken

Dawn

1993

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Since the mid-1990s Doug Aitken has produced large-scale moving-image installations that investigate the nature and structure of our increasingly mobile, ever-changing, image-based contemporary condition. Dawn, one of his earliest videos, consists of a series of appropriated scenes from four made-for-TV teen movies created in the 1970s and 1980s, a moralistic genre that commonly focused on issues of loneliness, heartbreak, and white suburban disaffection. By splicing and carefully fusing together the separate extracts, the artist produced his own nonlinear narrative that stands as an emblematic example of Aitken’s early video investigations into the cultural detachment generated by the flow of media imagery. [Permanent collection label, 2017]

  • Artist Doug Aitken (American, b. 1968)
  • Title Dawn
  • Date 1993
  • Medium Color video with sound
  • Dimensions duration | 6:0min.
  • Credit line Gift of Peter Norton, 2015
  • Copyright © Doug Aitken
  • Object number 33.2015

Rotation 1: Contemporary Art from the Peter Norton Gift
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 05/01/2015 - 08/02/2015

Received 3/23/2015
Peter Norton (Los Angeles, CA)

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