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Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) will present Heaven’s Gate, a new monumental video work by artist Marco Brambilla, opening on June 17.
A satirical, vertigo-inducing meditation on the Hollywood “Dream Factory,” Heaven’s Gate takes viewers through a time capsule of lush cinematic landscapes of collaged film samples collected from famous Hollywood images, featuring major stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Walken, Beyoncé, Audrey Hepburn, and Matthew McConaughey.
“The idea of Heaven’s Gate entering the world at this particular juncture in time seems somehow completely right. Our world, more than ever, is an undifferentiated chaos of dreams, nightmares and illusions, of shiny surfaces, optimism, pestilence and war. Life imitating art…as ever,” Brambilla said. In a totem-like display of screens, the viewer travels through a vertical landscape of infinitely looping scenes from prominent films, led upwards through a series of seven surreal landscapes that retell the history of the world — starting with the creation of the universe and culminating in a dramatic explosion — to examine human nature’s relationship to consumption and overabundance.
Referencing the luminous qualities of silver screen spectacles, the piece both celebrates collective storytelling consciousness and satirizes its saturated glamour. Film characters and fantastical set pieces are transformed into infinitely looping memes, trapped in time as media sculptures remove 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. “Marco’s work is as apt to be presented at the Sundance Film Festival as it is in a major international art museum or the walls of public spaces,” said PAMM director Franklin Sirmans. “He has consistently probed the world of cinema through video art with versatility, careful to mark the distinctions of both. While his work has always pushed the boundaries of new technology to visually engage with the screen, his recent work in virtual reality will literally create ‘new ways of seeing.’” The title Heaven’s Gate refers to Michael Cimino’s 1980 film whose extreme production costs bankrupted United Artists and effectively brought to an end 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 reappropriates 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.
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. Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), led by Director Franklin Sirmans, promotes artistic expression and the exchange of ideas, advancing public knowledge and appreciation of art, architecture, and design, and reflecting the diverse community of its pivotal geographic location at the crossroads of the Americas.
The 37-year-old South Florida institution, formerly known as Miami Art Museum (MAM), opened a new building, designed by world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron, on Dec. 4, 2013 in Downtown Miami’s Maurice A. Ferré Park. The facility is a state-of-the-art model for sustainable museum design and progressive programming and features 200,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor program space with flexible galleries; shaded outdoor verandas; a waterfront restaurant and bar; a museum shop, and an education center with a library, media lab, and classroom spaces.
