Sun Tunnels1978

Takes a close look at the many different processes involved in making art in the American landscape, away from urban centers and outside the usual art-world confines of museums and galleries. More specifically, it is a personal record of the making the filmmaker's art-work, "Sun Tunnels," in the remote northwest Utah desert. Being aligned with the sunsets and sunrises during the summer and winter solstices, the sculpture indicates the daily and yearly cycle of the sun. The sunlight, which changes slowly within the tunnels during the day, is speeded up, making available an experience of the work which is filmic in nature. "The work not only frames a landscape but exposes the process of the forming of that image. The participant/viewer becomes aware of his or her place in the physical environment and the process of making the image. As Holt says, 'The work becomes a human focal point, and in that respect brings the vast landscape back to human proportion and makes the viewer the center of things.' Holt has astronomically aligned the two sets of tunnels so that respectively, at the summer and winter solstices, at sunrise and sunset, the sun itself can be sighted through the tunnels. Adding another dimension to this universal overview, holes drilled in the tunnel surfaces (in formations of selected Constellations) cast light patterns on the insides of the tunnels. The inclusion of these astrological references not only reveal Holt's own sense of place in the universe (or the viewer's guided sense) but define as well a consciousness that would further use such information in an investigation of light and shadow at once visually engaging and at the same time revealing of the transitory nature of the experience... In the final sequences of the film we are privy to a sighting through the tunnels with the camera as the sun sets in its solstice, and then the shifting light patterns made by the 'star holes' speeded up by the time lapse photography offer an experience available only through a viewing of the film. It is in fact a filmic overview of the filmic qualities of the sculptures." – Bill Jones, Independent, May 1979 Video sale price: 300.00