HOWL, a new exhibition by Doug Aitken at 303 Gallery, is a poignant examination of a remote desert town whose primary industry is oil drilling. The film installation explores the life and death of a community that has relied on the extraction of fossil fuels. It is a portrait of broken promises: a town built in the early twentieth century, where closed storefronts and boarded-up buildings now line a desolate main street. In doing so, it poses pressing questions about our future in the twenty-first century. HOWL is a postmodern poem, an electric haiku culled from our contemporary industrial wilderness.
The work reflects on how we navigate our ideological and physical landscapes as we collectively evolve. Like a flowing musical composition, the film moves at speed, creating a fever-dream vision of our modern world. In the installation, viewers enter a darkened room where sound echoes and images are projected onto skeletal wooden structures clad in screens. Also situated within the space is a sculptural bus stop that doubles as a viewing space for the film, embedding the viewer within the work’s shifting images of the geological and industrial landscape.
Throughout the work, the town’s inhabitants speak candidly about their ideas of the future and their visions of utopia. A subtle ecological thread runs through HOWL: the arid desert is hammered by machines drilling relentlessly, their rhythm forming a musical composition of its own. Human voices merge with the rhythms of the machine and natural worlds, transforming words into soundscape. Moving from person to person, HOWL weaves a tapestry in which the town serves as a microcosm.
Sculptural works within the exhibition act as guideposts through the space. Made entirely from materials foraged in the urban landscape, they include microplastics washed up on the coast, discarded freeway rubber, repurposed used tires, composted seeds, and condensed organic matter. Each becomes a contemporary vessel composed of the landscape around us. Figures emerge: an ice machine holding an ecosystem of live cactus; a bus stop becomes both sculpture and a viewing space for the moving images of HOWL.
The parched terrain becomes the backdrop to a ragged, restless energy. Like the movement of the derricks, repetition becomes a metaphor for modern life: do we stay in motion, repeating our actions, or find a way to break from patterns and change?