A Video Art Installation on How Even the Hardest Seasons Give Way to a New Day

The luscious images of the video installation express the ephemeral nature of the human experience and the liminal space between life and death.
Credit: Tampa Museum of Art

“Kiss the Day Goodbye” is a video art installation by New York-based filmmaker, Charles Atlas, known for his cinematic collaborations with American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Atlas served as assistant stage manager and videographer with Cunningham’s dance company in the 1970s and 1980s and made significant contributions to “media-dance”, a form of art that conceives choreography for film rather than live performance. 

Their fellow collaborator, multidisciplinary artist, Robert Rauschenberg, designed sets, lighting and costumes for the dance troop and inspired Atlas throughout his career. In 2015, while an artist in residence at Rauschenberg’s former home and studio in Captiva, Florida, Atlas filmed a series of sunsets in sequence and arranged the footage in a grid, with each stage of the sunset numbered 1-36, set to mood music, and synced with a timer counting down from 18 minutes til sunset, the landscape looping in continuum.

Charles Atlas’ “Kiss the Day Goodbye”
Credit: Tampa Museum of Art

Atlas designed a simple yet compelling video installation that captures the ephemeral nature of the human experience and the liminal space between day and night, light and dark, presence and absence, life and death. The viewer is confronted with impermanence and encouraged to meditate on the melancholy beauty of life as defined by moments that aren’t meant to last and are all the more spectacular for their temporal nature. 

The Tampa Museum of Art is a fitting host for Charles Atlas’ “Kiss the Day Goodbye”, on view through January 2026; Florida is no stranger to landscapes suddenly altered, if not completely leveled, by acts of nature. Pummeled by three back-to-back hurricanes in 2024, the region is still recovering. Even as residents rebuild, there is an awareness and acceptance of the cycle of creation and destruction inherent in inhabiting this storied landscape.

Currently at the Tampa Museum of Art, the Charles Atlas installation “Kiss the Day Goodbye”
Credit: Tampa Museum of Art

Loss is always a possibility, but gulf coast residents who choose to weather hurricane season, year after year, know that even the most harrowing storms— like the most difficult seasons of our lives— will pass, and though the horizon may not look the same, beauty remains, and the sun will rise again.