FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Please List
Marco Lando
The Trip
October 31–November 26, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 2nd: 6–8pm
Interview with the Artist: Thursday, November 16th: 6–8pm
Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present The Trip, Marco Lando’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. On view from October 31 through November 25, it will feature an installation of recent video work and photographs that continue the artist’s interest in creating celestial mise-en-scenes that, portentous and dreamy, evoke the loss of symbolic order. The Opening Reception will take place on November 2, from 6–8pm.
An interview and talk with the artist will take place on Thursday, November 16 from 6–8pm.
The Trip comprises a series of four eponymous black-and-white videos (all created in 2023), wherein stark and solemn skyscrapers float through cosmic space. These architectural paeans to a lost civilization slowly rise, tilt, and move with no apparent purpose. Unmoored by gravity and function, they are sci-fi ruins from a defunct planet set adrift in a cold, godless universe. Though the movements in each video represent the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), the paths they trace ultimately lead nowhere. So too, the lights that inexplicably blaze on and off in their windows punctuating the darkened skies like a grid of stars, illuminate nothing beyond their contours.
Lando treats his buildings like living entities – almost human, but not quite – and they gain their eery, forlorn affect accordingly. The soundtrack accompanying these videos reflects this ghostly quality with its merging of the mechanical and organic. Combining the sounds of creaking metal with whale cry recordings, it distorts and manipulates any distinction between the two. Rather than convey ideas of a harmonious, efficient technology, Lando’s celestial music is marked by imperfection and uncertainty.
Accompanying the video installation will be a suite of photographs from Lando’s ongoing series, Alchemy (2016-present). These black-and-white images depicting still versions of the imagery in the videos are also manipulated digitally, and function as freeze frames or stills. More romantic in tone, they offer a softness that counters the ominous sensibility of the videos, injecting an atmospheric quality to the overall installation that invites viewers to imagine themselves drifting along with the buildings in a somnolent bliss.
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12–6pm
For further information please contact: Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director or Jenny Belin, Assistant Director at viridianartistsinc@gmail.com or view the gallery website: www.viridianartists.com.