HD video
31 minutes
Stereo sound track with original music by Laura Ortman
A video shot at night from a boat on the Hudson River depicting, in the projected beam of its marine searchlight, passage upriver from Hook Mountain to Haverstraw Bay, retracing part of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage in which his crew had a bloody encounter with the local Natives. The searchlight projection references Hudson River Night Line boats, which shone spotlights onto shoreline monuments for touring passengers, and the work also references moving panoramas and Hudson River School painting. Its passage from wooded shoreline to modern marina—via industrial quarry, current luxury housing, historic village, and power plant—traces its temporal and physical development from indigenous terrain (“Shattemuc” being one of the Native names of the Hudson) to contemporary American landscape subject to environmental issues.