Streamside Day (2003)

Streamside Day, explores the formative role of ideological and semiotic systems in establishing social rituals and traditions. Huyghe’s exhibition includes five murals, concealed behind five supplementary walls, which are revealed when the walls begin to slowly move through the gallery to configure a pavilion in which a short fiction film is projected. When the film ends, the walls retract to their original positions along the perimeter of the space, restoring the gallery to its pristine condition. After opening with scenes from an Edenic landscape, Huyghe’s film traces the formation of a burgeoning community hypothetically located in the Hudson Valley. The first of two sections limns a mythic kernel that is then instantiated in scenes from a typical inaugural celebration devised to forge communal identity.