Centre
Artist Talk: Marco Brambilla in conversation with Phoebe Greenberg
October 4, 2022
Exploring synthetic frontiers of utopia
Discussion
Contemporary Art
Centre
EXPERIENCE
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Marco Brambilla:
Heaven's Gate
- Experience
- Immersion
- Storytelling
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PHI Centre
Space B + Space C
315 Saint-Paul St West
Montreal, Quebec, H2Y 2A3
Wednesday:
12 pm to 8 pm
Thursday and Friday:
12 pm to 10 pm
Saturday:
10 am to 10 pm
Sunday:
10 am to 8 pm
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Heaven's Gate is included in the admission price for Pathway 2: Marco Brambilla and Pathway 3: Horizons VR.
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Two immersive Renaissance tableaux for our hyper-mediated digital era, these artworks by Marco Brambilla will engulf you in landscapes of pop-culture iconography.
Heaven's Gate is a monumental new work by video artist Marco Brambilla. A lavish, satirical, and vertigo-inducing meditation on the Hollywood “Dream Factory,” Heaven's Gate is a work of digital psychedelia employing the same state-of-the-art computer compositing technology as the films it references.
The viewer travels through a vertical landscape of infinitely looping and collaged film samples, led upwards through seven surreal landscapes. The panoramas are arranged vertically into a digital totem, in which the monument of our worship questions human nature's tendency towards consumption and excess. Film characters and fantastical set pieces are transformed into recurring memes, trapped in time as media sculptures removed from their original context, now inhabiting a hyper-sensory parallel universe where the lines between gaming, news, reality TV, and Hollywood are part of the same human epic.
The title Heaven's Gate refers to Michael Cimino's 1980 film, whose excessive production costs bankrupted United Artists and effectively ended the era of director as auteur, paving the way for the studio domination of the medium, which has continued to the present day. The work re-appropriates the language of pop culture to depict the tensions present in religion, industry, and celebrity: ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess.
Employing spectacle to describe the hollowness of spectacle, Heaven's Gate enacts Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase, "the medium is the message." Through this absorbing work, Brambilla highlights the sensory overload of today's compendium of popular culture to engulf the viewer's senses with a hyper-saturation of imagery almost impossible to sustain.
About Marco Brambilla
Marco Brambilla is a video artist based in London. Brambilla’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum (New York); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ARCO Foundation (Madrid); and the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C). Notable shows include New Museum, New York; Santa Monica Museum of Art (Retrospective); Seoul Biennial, Korea; Broad Art Museum; and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Brambilla has worked with Creative Time and Art Production Fund in New York to present public art installations, and is a recipient of the Tiffany Comfort Foundation and Tiffany Colbert Foundation awards. His work has been featured at the Venice Film Festival and Sundance Film Festivals, as well as Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.
Related Event
Centre
Artist Talk: Marco Brambilla in conversation with Phoebe Greenberg
October 4, 2022
Exploring synthetic frontiers of utopia
Discussion
Contemporary Art
Credits
Heaven’s Gate (Triptych)
By Marco Brambilla
8K colour video, with sound
UK, 2021
6min., 20 sec, loopCreated by Marco Brambilla
Produced by Marco Brambilla Studio
Flame Artists: Alisdair Burnett, Duncan Malcolm
After Effects Artist: Pete Fullarton
Producers: Duncan Buxton, Tasha Laranjo
Music: Stefan Smith, Phil Bolland
Heaven’s Gate (VR)
By Marco Brambilla
Virtual reality
UK, 2021
5min., 10secCreated by Marco Brambilla
Produced by Marco Brambilla Studio
Flame Artists: Alisdair Burnett, Duncan Malcolm
After Effects Artist: Pete Fullarton
Producers: Duncan Buxton, Tasha Laranjo
Music: Stefan Smith, Phil BollandVFX Production: Glassworks VFX, London
Sound Production: Factory, London
With the financial support of
Discovery Partner
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