Marco Brambilla @ Christopher Grimes
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Marco Brambilla’s newest video work, “Civilization (Megaplex),” is a brilliant tour de force, a 2½-minute extravaganza so dense with imagery, references and associations that it begs to be watched again and again. After repeated cycles, the work still feels inexhaustible.
The Italian-born, L.A.-based Brambilla has dazzled before with complex video installations that often riff on the vexed appeal of spectacle and the seductions of mediated experience. “Civilization,’ left, takes on the big picture — heaven, hell and what lies in the middle. It’s an amazing tapestry woven from snippets of 300 films, recent and older, domestic and foreign, mainstream and cult favorites, set to an excerpt from Stravinsky’s darkly fecund “Rite of Spring.”
Brambilla integrates the clips into an expansive landscape that, projected the size of a small movie screen, continuously scrolls downward, starting with the belching fires of hell and hate, progressing through the realm of labor and order on to leisure and celestial reward. Just before the cycle repeats, we see a row of figures (angels?) scattering fake snow down onto the heavens.
Everything in the work is fake/staged, but the way representations of reality (or fear or fantasy) blur with the real thing is part of what gives Brambilla’s work its gripping power. Ironic or not, there’s an authenticity that comes from this aggregate of our contrived visions.
A second work, “Cathedral,” shown in the back gallery on a flat-screen monitor, has a quieter, more studious feel. Brambilla filmed Christmas shoppers in a Canadian mall and used the footage as raw material for a long, slow sequence of kaleidoscopic patterning. Images mirror, repeat and invert. The result is a technologically upgraded version of the cut-paper snowflake — a little marvel yet another mildly disturbing take on familiar comforts.
Friday’s paper will have reviews of Rachel Whiteread @ Gagosian; Ryan Mrozowski @ Weinberg; and, Sze Tsung Leong @ Shoshana Wayne.
--Leah Ollman