Reception: West of the Sun

Presenting the work of Laine Rettmer, West of the Sun is an exhibition developed from Sinclair, an ongoing moving image and installation project examining Sinclair, Wyoming, a company town built around one of the nation's oldest continuously operating oil refineries, and the ways industry shapes memory, movement, and daily life. Shot on 16mm film, the project draws on interviews, archival materials, landscape footage, and staged actions with local participants. Rather than following a traditional documentary structure, it uses choreography, repetition, and cinematic staging to explore how identity is performed within a shared industrial environment.

Developed through repeated visits to the town, Sinclair has been built through long-term relationships with local residents and an accumulation of filmed, recorded, and archival material. West of the Sun presents the project at a moment when its questions have shifted from production to form. Rather than gathering new material, the exhibition considers how images, voices, and gestures change when distributed across multiple screens, how sound moves through space, and how viewers construct relationships between simultaneous points of view.

Presented during Rettmer's residency at Unbound Visual Arts, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a working installation where editing, sound, and spatial relationships remain open to revision. Alongside the multi-channel installation, the residency will support the development of shorter single-channel works and the early stages of a libretto drawn from the same interviews and historical material, offering visitors a glimpse into a project still taking shape across multiple forms.

Laine Rettmer is an artist and director working across photography, moving image, installation, opera, and live performance. Their work examines how images shape identity, memory, and collective imagination through staging, repetition, and performance.

Rettmer’s visual and time-based work has been presented at the Brooklyn Museum, the MIT Museum, and the RISD Museum. Their feature film Oblivion received Best Musical Film at the Cannes World Film Festival and Best Experimental Feature at the Touchstone Independent Film Festival. A solo exhibition of their work will open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in November 2027.

Rettmer is Associate Professor of Photography and Expanded Media and Graduate Program Director of the MFA Photography program at the Rhode Island School of Design.