Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds
Opening Apr 2025
Marina Zurkow, Mesocosm (Wink, Texas), 2012. Custom software-driven hand-drawn animation, aspect ratio 16:9. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2019.309. © Marina Zurkow. Animation in collaboration with Michelle Mayer. Sound in collaboration with Lem Jay Ignacio. Software Developer, Sam Brenner
Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds features a selection of software-based works by Marina Zurkow (b. 1962, New York, NY), an artist who explores the intersection of nature and culture through various mediums, including animation, code, and participatory experiences like dinners and card games. In the two works on view in the Museum’s fifth-floor gallery and the adjacent Hyundai Terrace Commission, Zurkow uses software that drives the interplay of the elements seen on screen and their ever-changing compositions to reflect on the complexity of ecological and social systems.
The animations Mesocosm (Wink, TX) (2012) and The Earth Eaters (2025) in the fifth-floor gallery both imagine the implications of environmental damage and the repeated extraction of raw materials. Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) is an animation that depicts the landscape surrounding Wink Sink 2, a large sinkhole that has been expanding steadily since it formed in 2002 on private oil company property in the small Texas town of Wink. The Earth Eaters is an animated, software-based “fairy tale” that depicts an endless cycle of floating islands, animal inhabitants, and miners who hack away at the land. Together, these works evoke impermanence and loss as environments change and disappear due to human intervention and natural evolution.
Learn more about The River is a Circle
Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.
