Skip to navigation Skip to content

Centre

→ Marco Brambilla:
Heaven's Gate

  • Experience
  • Immersion
  • Storytelling
Look up to address on google map

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

Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays

Heaven's Gate is included in the admission price for Pathway 2: Marco Brambilla and Pathway 3: Horizons VR.

Two immersive Renaissance tableaux for our hyper-mediated digital era, these artworks by Marco Brambilla will engulf you in landscapes of pop-culture iconography.

Exposition Marco Brambilla Heavens Gate IMG1

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.

Exposition Marco Brambilla Heavens Gate IMG2

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

Credits

Heaven’s Gate (Triptych)

  • By Marco Brambilla
    8K colour video, with sound
    UK, 2021
    6min., 20 sec, loop

  • Created 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., 10sec

  • Created 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

  • VFX Production: Glassworks VFX, London

    Sound Production: Factory, London

  • With the financial support of













  • Discovery Partner

More Events at PHI

PHI Event Centre Myriade Chromatique Credit sylvain dumais V2

Free

Centre

Chromatic Myriad

August 15 → July 31

The PHI Centre showcases a light installation with evolving content, adapting to the seasons and exhibitions

Installation Technology
PHI Event Centre Beats COVER

Limited Places

Centre

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats

February 7 → April 28

An interactive virtual reality adventure that takes audiences back to the heyday of the UK’s illegal Acid House rave scene of the late 1980’s

Virtual Reality Music
PHI Event Centre Habitat Sonore Fev2024 Cover

Dolby Atmos Mix

Centre

Habitat Sonore: Listening room

February 15 → April 28

Tune out outside noise and immerse yourself in one of Montreal's only spatial audio listening rooms. The artists: Dominique Fils-Aimé, Michael Gary Dean, SlowPitchSound and Tanya Tagaq

Experience Music
PHI Event Horizon Kheops Experience COVER

Off-Site Location

The Horizon of Khufu

February 16 → May 31

The immersive experience Horizon of Khufu, presented in the Old Port, is a unique VR expedition to discover the wonders of Egypt

Virtual Reality Immersion
PHI Event Centre Espacesincarnes COVE Rv2

Free

Centre

Embodied Spaces

February 24 → December 31

A monthly gathering of live performances where art comes to life

Performance Community
PHI Event Centre FMG16eanniversaire COVER

Centre

Forward Music Group's Sweet Sixteen Revue

April 24

Come celebrate Forward Music Group's 16th anniversary at the PHI Centre, featuring Backward Music artists Sarah Pagé, Nick Schofield and Charbonneau/Amato

Performance Music
PHI Event Centre Annie Claude Deschenes COVER

Centre

Annie-Claude Deschênes

April 26

The multidisciplinary artist presents the minimal pop and electronic sounds of her first solo project, Les manières de table

Performance Music