Facing West Shadows: The Endless End

Facing West Shadows: The Endless End

Facing West Shadows: The Endless End is a cinematic, sculptural installation and now a live expanded cinema performance that illuminates the perpetuation of extinction and survival. Through film, shadow puppetry, stop motion animation, and rich soundscapes, this immersive work addresses the endurance and demise of specific North American species and the interconnectedness of ecosystems. Using found historical footage, shadow puppetry, and early photographic studies, this work marks the passage of time and explores humanity’s complex role as prey, predator, caretaker, and destroyer. 

Facing West Shadows: The Endless End

Facing West Shadows: The Endless End is a cinematic, sculptural installation also performed as a multichannel expanded cinema by Lydia Greer that illuminates the perpetuation of extinction and survival, the disrupted life cycles of native plants and animals, aquatic systems, and fire ecologies as affected by anthropogenic climate change. The viewer’s attention is guided through projected moving images, hand-made animation, and cast shadows with a multi-dimensional soundscape. Collapsing and expanding time, North American species will live and die within a looping, overlapping, multichannel, and multidirectional projection. Our role as animals within a system and as the planet’s apex predator is illuminated in a sculptural environment. As in proto-cinematic cave paintings and ancient shadow theatre storytelling traditions, Facing West Shadows: The Endless End seeks to understand non-human species and our relationships with them.

By weaving multiple moving images of Bay Area/North American ecologies, mycorrhizal networks, mirror neurons, fire, and water, Facing West Shadows: The Endless End takes the viewer on a time-based and immersive journey through cycles of ecological and species extinction and sometimes, survival.

The Endless End was created at the DEAR residency for time-based arts in 2020 (Oakland, CA) during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the skies were apocalyptically tinged orange with wildfire smoke. The piece was then installed as a looping 750 sq ft multi-channel cinematic sculptural installation at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art for five months in 2022. Facing West Shadows worked together to create the installation (principal members: Lydia Greer (artistic director) and Caryl Kientz (theatrical director) in collaboration with artist Ya Wen Chien with additional artwork provided by John Hundley Greer and children who created and sent bird and insect puppets to Facing West Shadows during the pandemic. Music composed by Kristina Dutton and Fay LaRoque.