Dorothy Cross Introducing Nancy Holt's "Pine Barrens" (1975) from Holt/Smithson Foundation on Vimeo.
Today is our sixth Holt/Smithson Foundation Friday Film in our spring 2020 program and, for the second week, we stay in New Jersey with Nancy Holt’s 1975 film “Pine Barrens.”
Here artist Dorothy Cross gives a short introduction from the windy west of Ireland. Our thanks are many to Dorothy. The bump you will hear is Dorothy’s dog, Connie, landing at her feet.
One of our forthcoming exhibitions is “Light and Language” at Lismore Castle Arts where Dorothy has a permanent installation of her 2014 work “Eye of the Shark.”
Stay tuned for the film to be posted on IGTV at Vimeo at 12 noon MDT.
In “Pine Barrens” we never see the Pineys, the people who call the Pine Barrens home. We hear them talking about their pride and vexation for the fruitless land they call home. “A Piney is a person who’s lived in the Pines all their life and seldom ever goes to a city, because we don’t care for the city. There’s too many people there. We like to be more alone, you know. I’m not cutting the city down or nothin’ like that, but here you got open spaces, you got a tree to go to if you know what I mean, and stuff like that.”
The soundtrack features the music of Bill Patton’s Pine Barrens Trio, local musicians who played regularly at the Green Bank Inn. As the Pineys relate their struggles to make a living and describe supernatural encounters with the “Jersey Devil,” Holt’s lens investigates the site, revealing the beauty of its details.
