Ghost Ships and Mourning Doves
Essay and Public Talk About the Work of Robin Lasser and Sydney Brown
Robin Lasser, Ghost Ship & Mourning Dove series (2025)
I contributed an essay The Ethics of Remembrance Staged by Memorials to the catalog Ghosts Ships and Mourning Doves: Robin Lasser and Sydney Brown published in conjunction with an exhibition at Chung 24 Gallery, San Francisco (October 1st - December 13th, 2025).
I also joined Robin Lasser and Sydney Brown for a public conversation at the gallery on Saturday, November 8th. An excerpt follows:
I first met Robin Lasser in 1990, when she and her then-collaborator Ray Beldner proposed a multi-media installation for the Berkeley Art Center, where I was the curator. Their installation, The Language of Volcanoes: Pompeii Revisited, evoked the historic devastation of Pompeii in 79AD as a setting in which to consider the interplay between natural and manmade disasters. Situated as if within the red walled interior of an ancient Roman villa, a video projection of volcanic eruptions, fires, earthquakes, and nuclear explosions activated a darkened gallery wall, conjuring the unfolding nightmare of environmental decimation. At the center of the space stood a Classical sculpture of a woman balancing an amphora on her shoulder; liquid poured from it into an ornamental pool. The pool was surrounded by a wood and crushed charcoal checkerboard floor, which crunched underfoot like lava as visitors approached. Up close, the trickling liquid was revealed to be a rivulet of oil slowly engulfing the face and body of the sculpture. To one side of the entrance a lead table held two plaster tablets inscribed with volcanic terminology such as ozone layer, heat, suffocation, and ignite.
The palpable experience of this installation, which powerfully expresses the tension between ancient and contemporary events – and more broadly, humans and nature – has remained central to Lasser’s personal ideology and creative output. Since that time, our evolving ecocide – from oil spills to global warming – has been a central focus of Lasser’s work. After several decades of exploring issues of sanctuary, global migration, and their impact on the built and natural environments, her focus has shifted recently to themes of profound environmental and personal loss in the contemporary world. To reflect on these losses, Lasser began a series of intimate memorials and collaborative multimedia installations. Three of the memorials—Migration, Sea Shanty, and Water Towers (all 2024-2025)—feature small copper reliquary-like sculptures by artist Sydney Brown, onto which thematically grouped selections of Lasser’s films are projected. Each memorial has complex layers of meaning created by pairings of their material symbolism with song, spoken word, and moving images. The Migration Memorial features gospel songs I Don’t Want No Trouble at the River and The Storm is Passing Over, sung by the Plattsburgh Gospel Choir. The Water Tower Memorial, dedicated to Lasser’s mother, Phyllis Lasser, features her mother’s poetry, read as part of Lasser’s film. Each of these works serve as a memorial to water, while celebrating the interconnections between nature and one another.
What are the ethics of remembrance staged by memorials?
This is a powerful question that Robin Lasser asked me to think and write about, relative to her recent memorial projects. There are numerous potential answers, united around the central questions of whose stories are being told? How are they represented? And are they accessible? In recent years there has been a movement away from more traditional monuments that used scale, materiality, and historical tropes–a man on a horse–to evoke remembrance. But for the past half century, artists have been addressing memorial projects from a more holistic perspective, creating projects that encourage individual and group recollections and stories of things that have been lost–family, loved ones, community; home and country; forests, lakes and trees; lives lost in service; possessions at the bottom of the sea.
About the title work of this show: Ghost Ships and Mourning Doves
One of Lasser’s most compelling memorial projects is Ghost Ships and Mourning Doves: Finding Sanctuary in Impermanence (2025), a four minute film that visually and aurally expresses the ephemerality of life. The film opens with an image of a frozen Buddha being transported on an ice ship, set against a compositional score driven by urgent and mournful cello music by Argentinian collaborator, Gustavo Lorenzatti, and punctuated by cooing doves. The figure and vessel are spectral, insubstantial, and the ship–having no crew–slowly melts as flickers of flames seen above and beneath the surface of the water hasten their disintegration. Part way through this metamorphosis, Lasser begins to read a poetic text that addresses the fleeting nature of life, the dissolving self, melting glaciers, and the transformation of the planet due to climate change. The multisensory experience becomes keenly poignant as she reveals that her words double as a eulogy for her brother as well as for Planet Earth:
I’m dreaming of ghost ships offering fleeting passage to the other side. You remind me of the ice buddha and our impermanence; What is our archeology of loss in the time of climate change? I am finding peace in unexpected places in the wake of your loss. I’m feeling the warmth of your eternal flame. Love, your sister Robin
This work also affirms Lasser’s persistent thematic linking—throughout her work—of the self and the environment and articulates the implicit disintegration/denial/abuse of the body as well as its ecosystem.
— Excerpt from talk adapted from essay The Ethics of Remembrance Staged by Memorials in “Ghosts Ships and Mourning Doves: Robin Lasser and Sydney Brown” with additional essays by Alena Sauzade, Robin Lasser, and Sydney Brown.
Exhibition Catalog Available
The exhibition catalog Ghosts Ships and Mourning Doves: Robin Lasser and Sydney Brown which includes my essay as well as additional texts by Alena Sauzade, Robin Lasser, and Sydney Brown, is available for purchase online:
Video of Public Conversation at Chung 24 Gallery
The event at Chung 24 Gallery in which I spoke with Robin Lasser and Sydney Brown was recorded and is now publicly available: