NARRATOR:  

This piece is called Dawn Burn. It was made by video pioneer Mary Lucier in 1973. On the seven monitors, you are seeing a sequence of seven sunrises over the East River in New York. In each successive videotape, from left to right, the picture tube inside of the camera ― and thus the image you are seeing on the screen ― has been burned over and over by the intensity of the sun’s light.  

Robert Riley, former Media Arts Curator at the Museum.  

RILEY:  

Dawn Burn is a significant video installation. Not only does it work with the screen size of the television monitor itself to evoke a sense of time and landscape, it turns a failure of the video image into a poetic device that she then uses as content in the piece. It’s a continuation of the notion of mark-making in art to video, because the sunrise will actually burn a scar into the tube, which will always be visible. 

NARRATOR:  

Lucier’s later work has dealt primarily with environmental issues. In the early 1970s, however, her interest was more in the process of video making itself. In Dawn Burn, she has used the electronic, time-based medium to make the passage of seven days into a tangible, visible, sculptural work. If you watch the burning rays of the sun in these tapes, however, you can easily imagine the danger of solar exposure as an environmental hazard.