What Is Missing?

"I'm always trying to reveal in my art a little bit about nature that is literally invisible to us," says internationally acclaimed artist and architect Maya Lin in recent a video by The New York Times. In the short visual portrait, Lin eloquently describes a three-part series of landscape pieces titled Wave Field, which involved re-landscaping large fields by sculpting differing wave patterns into the earth. The rolling, grassy hills let visitors experience land and water in a new and powerful way as what is usually fluid and ephemeral becomes eerily fixed and solid. Lin isn't known as a filmmaker, and yet she recently turned to video as part of a passionate, new memorial project, titled What Is Missing? which includes several components, including a Web site and what will eventually be a series of short videos and a book. For the first video, Lin achieves a disjuncture similar to that of Wave Field in prompting us to experience an idea viscerally. The video presents images of five famous international parks, with a cryptic tagline noting a duration of destruction. Gradually we learn what these phrases mean, and Lin deftly makes visible what to many of us is an invisible - and often therefore negligible - ecological issue. With music by Brian Eno and Brian Loucks and production through @radical media, the piece underscores the power of simplicity.