Built to Spill

This month, multi-media artist Aleksandra Mir’s 16-minute film The Seduction of Galileo Galilei opens at the Whitney. Shot last summer in Stouffville, Canada, in a dusty field bordering a racetrack, the film records a simple test of gravity: tires are precariously stacked nearly two stories high by construction workers until eventually the rubber tower tilts and crashes. The collapse is, of course, assumed from the onset, yet it is through the Polish-born artist’s exercise in practical physics that she provides instruction on earthly limitations. Appearing alongside this cinematic adventure in gravity is an earlier series of collages, “The Dream and the Promise,” which delicately mixes Eastern Orthodox iconography with the cosmos at large.