Creating a continuous loop through cinematic history, New York-based video artist Marco Brambilla satirizes seminal moments of the silver screen in large-scale video installation, Heaven’s Gate. Oscillating between hyper-saturated imagery, capturing the polarities of the Hollywood spectacle, the piece explores the tensions and intersections of religion, industry, and celebrity – the meteoric rise and catastrophic falls, and the loss of innocence to experience and excess.
Taking the European premiere to London’s Outernet Arts, the collaged work compresses 500 looping film clips into four minutes, ascending through a series of surreal landscapes: vertical lava fields, waterfalls, prehistoric forests, industrial landscapes, and palaces of consumption, finally landing at the heavenly fields of celebrity spectacle and chaos. A rich tapestry of influential material is pieced together as a metaphorical journey traversing Dante’s seven levels of purgatory, vertically arranged, and unearthing new conflicts as the viewer rises through a labyrinth of labyrinths.
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