The Edition

Creating a continuous loop through cinematic history, New York-based video artist Marco Bramilla 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.

“By appropriating the language of the Hollywood epic, I wanted to confront the viewer with a glossy reflection of humanity’s perpetual quest for material gain. The epic nature of this presentation fully embraces the element of spectacle, inhabiting a hyper-sensory parallel universe where the lines between gaming, news, reality TV and Hollywood are part of the same human epic.”

The latest installment of Brambilla’s Megaplex series, which includes The Four Temperaments, Nude Descending a Staircase No.3, and Creation, Heaven’s Gate is a celebration of collective storytelling consciousness, commentating on the excesses of its saturated glamor, and the overarching spectacle that underpins the rise to fame. A panoramic landscape, collaged from iconic cinematic moments that together inform our understanding of the Hollywood Dream Factory – and the dark reality on which it rests.