600 HIGHWAYMEN: FIVE YEARS

In 2019, interdisciplinary theater company 600 HIGHWAYMEN—Guggenheim Fellows Michael Silverstone and Abigail Browde, described by Le Monde as “standard-bearers of contemporary theater-making”—began a visual record of life in rural New York. Each of their works takes a different form; here, it unfolds as a sustained field of moving images. A PS21 commission, FIVE YEARS is a multi-channel performance installation built from thousands of short clips, gathered over the course of five years, in close proximity to daily life.  The footage moves between diary and observation—sunlight across a table, hands in the dirt, snow underfoot, conversations in parking lots, a taxidermy auction, a neighbor’s bonfire, a parade passing through town, music from an open window. Shown side by side at large scale, meaning builds through accumulation and adjacency. A child is born. Seasons turn. Routines take shape. At the same time, other things come into view: protests, political action, pandemic conditions. They sit alongside everything else––the domestic and the public, what is seen close at hand and what unfolds beyond it. FIVE YEARS holds to this accumulation, as more enters the frame: a portrait of time in an ever-fluctuating now.