Format: Single Channel Video
Duration: 04:50Mins
Camera: Boaz Freund
Editing: Dana Levy
Soundtrack: Sebastian Meisner
Thanks To: John Rawlins Jane Hayland
Filmed At: The Carnegie Museum
Funded By: Israel Rabinowitz Film Fund
Darkness yields to light, death yields to life; Israeli-born artist Dana Levy’s The Wake is a meditation on duality. Shot in the Entomology Department at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh,
Levy released 100 monarch butterflies into the darkened corridors of department’s collections. Carefully mounted, preserved, and categorized specimens create a haunting stillness that is disrupted by an almost dreamlike awakening of butterflies on cases, drawers, and cabinets. Soon the entire collection seems to slowly return to life with movement and fight. The Wake explores subjects such as order and chaos, life and death, memory and nostalgia, archives, history, man’s relationship with nature, and dynamic reawakening. The stillness of the collection’s corridors bears silent witness to the passage of time: “A new life enters where one has left”. The ephemeral lives of these fragile insects come to represent our own inherent fragility, our desire to control and to be free, to find order and beauty in the chaos.
– Cheryl Lynn May Wexner Center For The Arts
