Doug Aitken: HOWL at 303 Gallery

Doug Aitken's HOWL runs at 303 Gallery in Chelsea from November 13 to December 19, 2026. The centerpiece is a film installation set in a remote desert town whose main industry has long been oil drilling.

The town was founded in the early twentieth century. Today its main street is lined with closed storefronts and boarded-up buildings. The film follows the rise and decline of a community that depended on pulling fossil fuels from the ground, and it reads as a portrait of promises that went unkept. From there it turns to questions about how we will live in the twenty-first century.

Visitors enter a darkened room where sound echoes and images are projected onto skeletal wooden structures fitted with screens. A sculptural bus stop sits in the space and also serves as a place to sit and watch, so viewers are placed inside the shifting views of geological and industrial terrain. The film moves quickly, like a piece of music, producing a fever-dream picture of the modern world.

Residents speak frankly about their ideas of the future and their visions of utopia. Machines hammer the arid ground without pause, and their rhythm becomes a composition of its own. Human voices blend with the sounds of machines and the natural world, so that words turn into soundscape. Moving from person to person, the work treats the town as a microcosm.

Sculptures act as guideposts through the room. All are made from materials foraged in the urban landscape: microplastics washed up on the coast, discarded freeway rubber, repurposed tires, composted seeds and condensed organic matter. Among them are an ice machine holding an ecosystem of live cactus and the bus stop that doubles as a viewing space.

Like the motion of the derricks, repetition stands in for modern life. The show asks whether we keep moving through the same actions or find a way out of the pattern and change.