EVAPORATED SEA: ANNIE RATTI CURATED BY IWONA BLAZWICK NOVEMBER 17 – DECEMBER 16, 2006

White Box is pleased to present Annie Rattis site-specific installation Evaporated Sea. Annie Rattis installation radically alters White Boxs seemingly archeological space by filling it with crystalline sea salt, challenging visitors to revise the parameters by which they view art and overturning any preconceptions they had about what constitutes an exhibition space. The floor is encrusted in salt and viewers experience the floating feeling of the sea by walking along the elevated wooden deck, allowing people to view the installation from its center. Eric Saties music combined with video images further enhances a receptive environment.

Annie Rattis Evaporated Sea is a kind of composite psychological window reflecting the appearance, disappearance, and the reincarnation of memories attached to social complexities. The rotational video images projected on three different walls of White Box are her own version of Red Balloon in New York City reminiscent of French filmmaker Lamorisses 1956 classic. In Rattis film, a lonely red balloon randomly soars through a forest of buildings in Manhattan, past Central Park and Times Square, down into China Town, with a train crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in which an anonymous crowd rides the wind like a free soul. The city filled with burdens and agonies appears symbolically touched by the sight of the red balloon and finally seems to arrive at the land of tranquility.

Annie Ratti has produced her video with Canadian cinematographer Christopher Walters. Annie Ratti has been working with video, photography, installation, and literary essays to question and rethink the contemporary human and urban conflicts, states of uncertainty, and unexpected perceptual cracks born out of perpetual comings and goings from her native country of Italy to France, the United Kingdom and the United States.