The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Marco Brambilla: The Dark Lining, exhibition on view May 21–August 20, 2011.
The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Marco Brambilla: The Dark Lining, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and premier of his groundbreaking work Evolution (Megaplex), hailed as the first-ever 3D artist video. This comprehensive survey of Brambilla’s stunning video and time-based work from 1999 to the present will offer audiences a spectacular view of his dynamic, complex, layered and thoughtful work particularly salient to this moment in both medium and content, as well as an ultimate visual feast of cutting-edge contemporary technology.
Marco Brambilla
In a poignant work from 2002 titled HalfLife, Brambilla juxtaposes surveillance footage of gamers playing the then-popular video game Counter-Strike with live-feed footage of the game they are playing. By placing the young men in the “cross-hairs” point-of-view while simultaneously capturing their virtual actions inside the game-world, Brambilla highlights the physical displacement and the psychological dislocation inherent in entering the digital world.
Cathedral, 2008, in which Brambilla filmed Christmas shoppers in a Canadian mall, exposes raw footage in a long and slow sequence of kaleidoscopic patterning. The superimposed and multi-layered images transform the mall into a hallucinatory space. Though it resembles an animated stained glass window, the work depicts commerce and conspicuous consumption, and the conflation of a “shoppers’ paradise” with a literal place of worship.
Brambilla’s Civilization (Megaplex), 2008, is dense with imagery and depicts heaven, hell, and in-between, in an epic, almost Dante-esque style, set to an excerpt from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. His first ‘video mural’ integrates clips into an expansive landscape that continuously scrolls downward, starting with the fires of hell, progressing through to celestial reward. Other works in the exhibition include Wall of Death, 2001; Sync, 2005; and Sea of Tranquility, 2006.
The ambitious installation design of The Dark Lining mirrors Brambilla’s complex visual arrangements where the viewer is led, almost transported, from singular, theater-like stations to open spaces where multiple works present themselves in layered concert with one another. The exhibition at SMMoA is unique from previous installations as this presents multiple significant works from the last decade and illustrate Brambilla’s artistic range and evolution. The exhibition itself, therefore, functions as an artwork—one that is revealed with the audience’s choreographed movement through a well-orchestrated and articulated space.
Marco Brambilla studied film at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, and then worked in commercials and feature films, directing the successful 1993 science fiction film Demolition Man. In 1998, he shifted his focus to video and photography projects as an artist and filmmaker. His work has been exhibited internationally at such institutions as the Kunsthalle Bern, screened at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the ARCO Foundation in Madrid, amongst others. Brambilla has been awarded both the Tiffany Comfort Foundation and Colbert Foundation awards for his video installations. He was born in Milan, Italy, and currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
Major support for this exhibition has been provided by The Chaney Family Foundation, Beth Rudin DeWoody, and Liz Swig. Additional support has been provided by The Suzanne Nora Johnson and David Gordon Johnson Foundation.
SMMoA is located at the Bergamot Station, Building G1, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica, California. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 AM to 6 PM, closed Sunday, Monday, and all legal holidays. Suggested donation: $5; $3 for seniors and students.
For further information about exhibitions and programs, please call 310.586.6488 or visit www.SMMoA.org