Continuing her run of visuals behind 2022 album Yet Again the Wheel Turns, Vancouver-based artist and Exclaim! New Faves alum Wallgrin has shared a new video for "At Rest."
For the latest cinematic accompaniment to the Exclaim! Staff Pick-certified sophomore album, Tegan Wahlgren decamped to British Columbia's Texada Island (sayayin), shooting the video at an abandoned limestone quarry. Directed by Sarah Genge, it finds the artist in solitude amid the vastness of the world around them, wandering through ruins of destructive industry and the striking nature of the unceded, ancestral lands of the Tla'amin Nation.
Wahlgren shares with Exclaim! that the video contrasts human, ecological and geological time scales, periods "so expansive that seldom do we get to see explicitly how they affect one another." That idea is brought starkly into focus at a location such as the quarry, where millions of years of geological development can be disrupted in days or hours. The artist recognizes, of course, that such activity cannot compare to movements of the Earth's tectonic plates, or the way layers of sediment form over millennia.
"'At Rest' imagines a great stillness — a moment where all human activity ceases," Wahlgren shares of her composition. "It's an idea that's been explored in science fiction many times over, a trope that touches on those deeply human fears of aloneness, abandonment, and death. But, in stillness, there is also peace to be found. Here, a human breath reminds us of how the universe itself is expanding — the inhale — and will then reverse course and contract — the exhale, the end of everything. The Big Bang and the Big Crunch are deepest breath ever taken."