"I arrived at video through performance, sculpture, photography, theater, music--mediums that evolve in time, involve a frame, and are three-dimensional. A video installation deals with time and space and placement and framing, sound, picture, movement, stillness--but in a single medium." --Mary LucierInternationally recognized for her visually elegant, thought-provoking video art, Mary Lucier was a sculptor, photographer, and performance artist before she turned to video in 1973. In Mary Lucier, the first book published on Lucier"s work, Melinda Barlow brings together a selection of Lucier"s previously unpublished writings and drawings along with essays, reviews, interviews, and photographs of her ephemeral installations and performances to create an absorbing portrait of one of America"s most accomplished video pioneers.Since 1970, when Lucier exhibited her first series of photographs in New York, she has been intriguing viewers with an aesthetic that perceives humanity and technology as equally organic, one whose unique blend of conceptual rigor and sensual lyricism is as compelling as it is deeply moving. Whether exploring the limitations of video technology, investigating America"s complex relation to landscape, or examining how people in different places survive catastrophe, Lucier"s work has been concerned with the most basic human issues: the cycles of birth, death, and regeneration; the necessity of memory; and the inevitability of decay.