In 2005 Marie Jager created a group of works that included a series of blueprint Los Angeles street maps altered by exposure to the sun, a nearly indecipherable overlapping of the words PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE incised in white acrylic, a photomontage of an enormous gem on a frozen Arctic island, a life-size black-and-white print of a disheveled young man, and—installed on a gallery's glass storefront entrance—a violet, pop-inflected vinyl adhesive graphic of slightly ominous vapors. These seemingly disparate works were grouped together under the title The Purple Cloud . The title is taken from an apocalyptic novel by British author M. P. Schiel. Originally serialized in Royal Magazine in 1901, the novel concerns a toxic purple cloud emanating from the ocean near Southeast Asia, which engulfs the earth's atmosphere, killing the entire population save Adam Jeffson, an explorer who is at the North Pole and outside the cloud's terminal reach.
Jager has referred to her recent body of work as a "trailer" for a filmic adaptation of Schiel's "last man" narrative: it operates spatially, like an exploded storybook narrative. The Purple Cloud follows on several other works Jager has adapted to film and video, including Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes and, more recently, Karel ?apek's futuristic play R.U.R. (or Rossum's Universal Robots, written in 1920, which introduced the term robot into our lexicon). The former was humorously transposed to contemporary Los Angeles; the latter also seems knowingly anachronistic as a vision of the future that, despite innumerable technological advances predicted by fiction, has yet to arrive. Jager's spatialized "trailer" for The Purple Cloud likewise exists in a paradoxical, nonexistent present, succinctly represented by the illegible conflation of past, present, and future.
While respectful of her chosen sources, Jager's adaptations are not strict transpositions of written fiction into moving image or discrete objects. Taking the role of the director, she emphasizes the decision-making process central to artistic practice: working selectively, she treats the original like a tattered and fragmentary ancient text, imposing her own authorial will by condensing, eliding, and extrapolating from the source material. Significantly, Schiel's novel was published just after the invention of cinema. Jager reminds us that the cinematic imaginary, which she engages with or without a camera, exists independently of cinema proper. The speculative fantasy of The Purple Cloud, while more than one hundred years old, arrives just in time for a present in which disaster—whether natural or cultural—always seems imminent.
This essay originally appeared in the catalogue for the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, October 31 - December 31, 2006.