Federico Solmi "Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth"
Postmasters Gallery
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Postmasters Gallery presents our first exhibition with a NY based Italian artist Federico Solmi. The show will center around his most recent animated video Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth, its prequel Song of Tyranny, and a group of heavily textured video-paintings and objects.
Solmi reinvents the visual world of animation by creating and sequencing images, capturing behind-the scenes technology that he borrowed and adapted from film and gaming. For the visually saturated videos on view at Postmasters, Solmi has created hundreds of drawings and paintings as skins for a 3D game environment. The process involves real time performance recorded inside that environment through motion capture technology. Solmi himself enacts all the main characters in his films and provides the voiceovers, becoming, in effect, a one-man film studio.
Several paintings in the exhibition incorporate screens with animated sequences that expand on the videos’ characters and storyline and literally enliven the stillness of a painted image. Other paintings re-represent the skins used for the animation resulting in images of toy-like objects and figures taken apart and flattened.
To execute the videos Solmi works in collaboration with Russell Lowe, an innovator in creative use of 3D game engines.
Through satirical commentary on authoritarian power structures Federico Solmi’s videos aim to lampoon the contemporary societies and the self–destructive nature of mankind. In contrast with their playful faux-naïve aesthetics the videos indict a male dominated, hierarchal world controlled by corrupt, arrogant dictators, politicians, business and religious leaders as forces behind the disintegration of ethical and moral values. Solmi has envisioned Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth as the central component in a trilogy. The first part, or prelude, A Song of Tyranny, introduces the Chinese protagonist being interviewed by an american journalist about his rise to power: a leader becoming a dictator - idolized, invincible and hell-bent on invasion of America. In Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth, the tale begins idyllically in the Garden of Eden and ends in a bloody triumphant takeover of the Times Square.
Media
Schedule
from February 16, 2013 to March 16, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-02-16 from 18:00 to 20:00