The Vigil, a 3-channel video & audio installation created by Doug DuBois in collaboration with his brother, Luke DuBois, presents a meditative contemplation on the passing of life as witnessed by their late grandmother during her final days.

The Vigil opens and closes with my grandmother’s teasing resistance to my attempts to video tape her on the eve of her 92nd birthday. The middle section presents intimate and abstract images of her final days in the hospital as her body shuts down and we await her death. During the five days of our vigil we shared a terrible and disquieting space of longing for a life lived. The Vigil is about this experience and the limited consolation offered by the body left behind.

Doug DuBois has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, SITE Santa Fe, Silver Eye Gallery in Pittsburgh, Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University . He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Light Work. His images have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Double Take, The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, Flesh and Blood, and The Spirit of Family. Doug’s video works include Loss Prevention, co-directed and edited with Jeanne Finley and John Muse in 2000, which premiered at the New York Video Festival in Lincoln Center and has been shown at the Guggenheim and the Cinematheque in San Francisco. The Vigil was first installed at Pittsburgh Filmmakers Gallery in 2004.