The artwork "Requiem", commissioned by and presented at The Shed, New York City, is a meditative tribute to Verdi's score for Messa da Requiem, or Catholic funeral Mass, and a reflection on the beauty of the natural world.

Mekas' Requiem is an unrelenting comment on life on this planet by an artist who, at the age of 96, was well aware of the horrors of the 20th century and dismayed by the events of the 21st. The primary imagery of this work - which is culled from footage shot by the artist over three-decades from his first Sony analog video camcorder to his HD pocket-sized Nikon - is flowers.

Cut flowers, garden flowers, wild flowers, and flowers in bloom on trees, hillsides, fields and elsewhere are accompanied by the sounds of nature and Giuseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem. Inter-titles with translations of lines from the Latin funeral Mass sung by the choir are interspersed throughout the work along with other imagery including recordings of TV news reports inspired by themes from the novel "The Betrothed", a classic of Italian literature set during a time of upheaval and plague by Alessandro Manzoni. For whom Verdi's "Requiem" was composed.

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