Keith Langergraber: The Dusk Meridian

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Keith Langergraber, "The Dusk Meridian," 2021

digital rendering by Sean Arden for site-specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite

The Dusk Meridian is a multimedia installation by the Vancouver– and Kelowna–based artist Keith Langergraber. Its principal features are scaled-down representations of two fire towers that are physically close but imaginatively separated: the real-life versions sit on either side of the border that divides Canada and the US at the southern boundary of E.C. Manning Provincial Park.

The title refers to the moment in time between the setting of the sun and the onset of darkness and to the geographical location of this phenomenon, which endlessly traverses the rotating surface of the planet. It is also a nod to Cormac McCarthy’s The Blood Meridian, an apocalyptic neo-biblical novel set on the border between the US and Mexico. These references are reiterated in the phantasmagoric light projected onto the fire towers, the pool of water on which they sit and the wall behind them, evoking a transitional condition somewhere between the setting of the sun and the approach of a catastrophic wildfire. But while the warmth of this light might contrast with the overcast gloom of a Vancouver winter, it offers little in the way of easy comfort.

Langergraber’s work serves as an allegory for crossing a point of no return: passing from light into darkness. Here, the devastation wrought by widespread wildfires—a force of nature unconstrained by abstractions like national borders—becomes the norm. The fire towers of The Dusk Meridian can be seen as silent witnesses to this transition, much like barometers measuring climactic change that has already arrived.

“Over the past twenty years Keith Langergraber has produced an extraordinary body of work that engages with real sites, imagined geographies and the histories that can be traced through them,” shares Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, “The Dusk Meridian is a compelling extension of his investigations into the failed promises embedded in these spaces and the implications they hold for an unpredictable and potentially ruinous future.”

Keith Langergraber studied at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and currently teaches at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. His research-based practice draws upon disparate references that run from utopian and dystopian literature, art history and outsider sub-cultures to the narratives embedded in a particular site. His work has been exhibited widely in Canada and abroad over the past twenty years.