Pipilotti Rist. Ever Is Over All, 1997; two-channel video and sound installation, color; 4:07; dimensions variable. Sound by Anders Guggisberg and Rist. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

Ever Is Over All (1997) first reeled me in—a video vignette that received extra pop-culture attention this year when one of Beyoncé’s music videos from Lemonade cited it. In Rist’s video, a White woman wears a light blue dress and red pumps. She grins euphorically as she struts down a sidewalk, carrying a cast-metal replica of a flower. She repeatedly swings the flower into the windows of parked cars, glowing all the while. A White female police officer passes her and nods approvingly. In this utopian wonderland, a (White) woman is free to move about public space as she pleases, with an expression of what might be a gesture of female rage. It’s a mixed bag (which Beyoncé’s video emphasizes): Are we expected to smile through the pain? Is our anger only acceptable when it is aesthetically pleasing?

Throughout the four floors, Rist’s recurring themes of gender, nature, and human bodies emerge through differing strategies in video and multimedia installations. Rist’s tactic of spatially manipulating the viewing experience repeats throughout. For example, a collection of Rist’s video pieces is viewable only by inserting one’s head into triangular boxes that protrude from the walls. There is no disembodied viewing here, as viewers must feel themselves move in order to watch.

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, 2016; single-channel video installations; installation view. Courtesy of New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

Any initial discomfort quickly turns to seduction. In one corner of a darkened room, two video pieces, Worry Will Vanish (2014) and Mercy Garden (2014), loop on the conjoined screens. Visitors recline on large, pebble-shaped cushions on the floor. I initially hesitated to join them, feeling conscious of how on display my own body would be. Reclining is a gendered pose, too, presenting a certain kind of to-be-looked-at-ness that is historically associated with women and traditional femininity. I felt surprised that Rist would initiate this possibility for viewing, but I eventually accepted the invitation for intimacy, drawn in as I was by the video. The seamless transition between the films and their visual similarities made viewing them like one long film. I interpreted them as one entity: a poetic combination of plant close-ups with human flesh.

Pipilotti Rist. Mercy Garden, 2014; two-channel video and sound installation, color, with carpet; 10:30; dimensions variable. Sound by Heinz Rohrer. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

On a different floor, another of Rist’s viewing environments,4th Floor to Mildness (2016), was created for the exhibition and takes this experience to the next level, as she provides numerous beds for visitors from which to watch projections on the ceiling. The footage for this environment is similarly dreamy and nature-focused. In these unusual reclining positions, I lost myself in the work. I could feel the comfort of Rist’s imagery. I felt in awe.

Awe is one of those words that embarrasses us today. When I first entered the exhibition, I bristled at the museum’s description of her work as “[fusing] the natural world with the technological sublime.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “sublime” as “of very great excellence and beauty; producing an overwhelming sense of awe or another high emotion through being vast and grand.” As a buzzword and the topic of much discussion in high art theory and aesthetics, the sublime is something I typically resist in all discussions of art, associating it with paintings of epic natural environments (oil painting, of course) that invoke the horror and magnitude of a patriarchal God. But Rist makes me want to give it a second chance, even where I least expect it.

Pipilotti Rist. 4th Floor to Mildness, 2016; video and sound installation with two projections onto two amorphous screens hanging horizontally from the ceiling, single and double beds with pillows and covers, four projectors, two moving mirrors, four media players, audio system, black sprinkler net, curtain, carpet, wall paint, neon; 8:11/8:11/7:03/6:19 mins. © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

The installation Pixelwald (Pixel Forest) (2016) is more atmospheric than anything, and doesn’t clearly align with the other works. Figurative images of bodies and plants are absent, in contrast with her earlier works foregrounding naked bodies and sex, such as the playfully erotic Pickelporno (Pimple Porno) (1992). Nonetheless, walking through the space is delightful and, in line with the other installations, invites viewers to feel their own embodied presence. Strands of glowing lights in textured crystalline resin orbs hang from the ceiling, like jewel-toned jellyfish, illuminating the darkness of the room. The colors shift, undulating in time to gentle instrumental music. It almost feels like a cheap trick, but it works—this mass-appeal magic of Christmas lights installed in a gesture toward infinity. Pixel Forest might be an underwater hallucination or travel among stars. It’s easy to get lost here alongside viewers taking selfie after selfie. Though it’s simple, Pixel Forest cultivates its own form of awe.

Pipilotti Rist. Pixelwald (Pixel Forest), 2016; hanging LED light installation and media player; 20:55; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

The installation adds to this new, accessible sublime that Rist puts forth. What Rist reveals is that the vast and grand is from this earth: It is human, it is plant, it can be conveyed through technology, it is even candy-colored and simple. The sublime could be ours again, removed from its loftiness—a newly humbled word, rooted in life, only whispering of what could be bigger than us.

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest will be on view at the New Museum in New York through January 15, 2017.

Laurent Grasso. Soleil Noir, 2014; 16mm film, looped; 11:40. Courtesy of the Artist, Galerie Perrotin, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco.

Night Begins the Day is a meditative, beautifully installed exhibition constructed around contemporary interpretations of the passage of time and the articulations of something larger or more powerful than we are able to comprehend through the sublime. Curator Renny Pritikin and Associate Curator Lily Siegel root the exhibition within a Jewish tradition of beginning the new day at sunset, rather than sunrise, allowing an askance look on themes with which artists have been working for centuries. Revisiting the often theoretically dense or traditionally romanticized concepts of the sublime, the twenty-seven contemporary artists whose work composes the exhibition employ new media, popular culture, and a critically shaped approach to an image’s ability to suggest anything beyond its own limitations.

The exhibition opens with a nod toward an image of the postmodern sublime, Peter Alexander’s nighttime landscape painting of the Los Angeles basin from the vantage point of the Griffith Observatory. Alexander is part of the first generation of Light and Space artists to come of age in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and the work sets the stage with a familiar starting point for the visual language and themes developed in the rest of the exhibition.

Also relying on a well-known visual trope of the sublime, Laurent Grasso takes on the rupturing volcano as a portal to the power of nature in his film Soleil Noir (2014). The work is installed as a full-wall projection, and the camera hovers over the mouth of an active volcano breathing smoke. The image at once activates terror and calm. No destruction occurs; a scene of terror becomes one of silent waiting. The now-green hillsides and ruins of Pompeii are reminders that we’ve been waiting for thousands of years. Christopher Woodcock shares a similar approach of adapting contemporary applications of the camera to majestic landscape painting in his The Great Western Divide series (2011). Taking as his subject the rugged peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, Woodcock uses a long exposure to photograph the landscape lit by a full moon, creating an otherworldly black-and-white image. The hours needed to create these images are at once antithetical to the medium of immediate photography, but represent nothing more than a moment in the archeological time of the mountain range.

Moving beyond the historically utilized icons of the power of nature, a number of the artists in the exhibition take on the unfathomable cosmos as their entry into engagement with the sublime. Robert Kooima, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering, is one of the few to take on the technological sublime, in a video-game-type participatory work in which the user flies through the galaxy by moving a joystick. This playful nod to past decades of digital programming initiates a new chapter of image exploration into a larger, unfathomable realm. Night Begins the Day shows that there is still a lot of space and time in which to think through unfathomable experience, and new forms by which we can approach its limits.

Night Begins the Day: Rethinking Space, Time, and Beauty is on view through September 20, 2015 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco.

Mary Coyne is a curator and writer from Los Angeles and New York. She is currently based in Minneapolis, where she is a research fellow at the Walker Art Center.

Jake Longstreth. Free Range, 2014; oil on canvas in artist frame; 60 x 40 in.

For urban dwellers with the means and motivation to leave the city in search of open space, there is a crucial moment when the last big-box store fades in the rear-view mirror and the mountains loom ahead. LA-based artist Jake Longstreth’s humble paintings featured in Free Range at Gregory Lind Gallery present the viewer with a likewise ambivalent moment when the promise of freedom becomes tinged with a nagging, indefinite apprehension.

Longstreth’s landscape paintings depict distant mountain ranges under vast skies, but they deal not so much with nature as with the concept of the sublime. A low-grade, unspoken dread is present in all nine of his paintings, which range in scale from intimate to body-sized. It is crucial to understand that the artist elected to paint from memory, which gives his imagination free rein—yet the works are restrained in composition, facture, and palette. It is precisely the use of an understated palette, especially in the skies where greenish grays and hazy pinks blend to dead blues in seamless gradations, that gives viewers the creeping sense that we are not experiencing the respite from the city that was promised. Rather, we experience nature’s inability to reveal anything to us other than what we project onto it.

Another way that Longstreth evokes the sublime is through his use of light. It recalls the work of 19th-century American Luminist painters such as Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade. As Barbara Novak puts it: “In the smaller luminist paintings … light, because of its silent, unstirring energy, causes the universe, as Emerson would have it, to become ‘transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own’ to shine through it.”[1] The light in Longstreth’s work, however, is subtly filtered through smog, dust, and wildfire smoke; it allows the viewers, in a surprisingly non-prescriptive way, to come to terms with the universe we’ve created, one whose “higher laws” are really just the consequences of our own actions.

Longstreth’s paintings successfully provide a moment of honest contemplation. It’s a silent moment, when one’s internal drama can coalesce with the knowledge of inescapable change—rising temperatures, mega-drought, year-round wildfire seasons, and diminishing air quality. We know all of these things to be true, yet we are compelled to drive out to the mountains, over and over again.

[1] Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press), 43.

Miguel Arzabe is a Bay Area-based visual artist working with painting and video. He has a degree in Environmental Fluid Dynamics and is an experienced outdoorsman.