Aspen Art Museum

From the archive

Trapping Lions in the Scottish Highlands

Borrowing its title from Alfred Hitchcock’s explanation of the MacGuffin, the seemingly indispensible but ultimately arbitrary device by which narrative is propelled, Trapping Lions in the Scottish Highlands examines questions of narrative complexity, disjunction, and ambiguity in recent art. Often combining fictional narration with seemingly archival or documentary footage, the works in the exhibition employ a range of tactics to blur the line between fiction and reality, weaving fragmentary stories around elusive or even entirely absent centers. From the elegant parsing of sound and ima…