The last smoking flight
Grabiel Lester
2024
Video
RED to HD video, 23:44 (2008), RED to 16mm, 9:32 (2010) A triptych in sequence composed of clouds, an airplane interior, and smoke. The film depicts a group of passengers in a small airplane, trapped in both time and space, on the way from nowhere and on the way to nowhere. This work is both a tribute and a lament to a highly potent and versatile symbolism of smoke and smoking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while simultaneously also a meditation on the ephemeral: the way life and ideas eventually pass and fade away.
The passengers are seen wrapped up in thought, lost as much in their imagination as the airplane is in time and space.
Artists
Gabriel Lester
Gabriel Lester Amsterdam (1972), is an inventor. His works consist of installations, sculptures, performances and films. Other activities include commissioned art in public space, physical structures and design.
Lester’s creations originate from a desire to tell stories and establish contexts and settings that support these stories or propose their own narrative interpretation. His vocabulary is characterized as cinematographic, without necessarily employing film or video as a medium. However, like moviemaking, Lester’s practice has come to embrace and utilize all imaginable media and talent. Open ended, unresolved, seeking to keep mysteries alive and without explicit messages or singular ideas, his works proposes ways to relate to the world, how it is (re-) presented and what mechanisms constitute our perception and understanding of it. With emphasis on human existence and experience, Lester’s projects aim to sharpen and flex the mind.
Credits & mentions
With the support of the Mondriaan fund, a public cultural funding organization dedicated to the visual arts and cultural heritage.
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