July 3 - August 31, 2020
Screening by Continuous Loop
Rock - Paper - Guillotine is a short film and gallery exhibition by Constanza Piaggio made in collaboration with her husband, Romain Sein. Sound was composed by musician Duncan Toth. Originally shot with 8mm film and converted to a digital HD format, this film is part of Piaggio’s larger work Mental Meteorites. Piaggio describes this work as a “plastic and formal visual study.”
Both the still frames of Mental Meteorites and the video Rock - Paper - Guillotine integrate images from the artist’s personal archive, dry pigments, and color grounds. Together these layers splice, layer, and intersect, and are reprocessed (through still or moving image). This work is playful and smart. Its process addresses the natural human desire to save memory and the intellectual art historical applications of this desire. The use of pigment is primal, raw, and direct. It speaks to the quest for the essence of memory, the foundation on which other images may be made. These essential elements are used from painting to (even) contemporary printmaking. Piaggio’s reference to collage speaks to the language of making, capturing, composing, and literally referencing “reality.” This effort is especially evident in the video, Rock - Paper - Guillotine as the use of the machine to crop paper in what feels like a red-lit darkroom interrupts Toth’s ethereal music. The transfer from film to digital adds yet another layer of process, method, and delivery of the final work.
This work is part of our Through The Glass gallery exhibition; patrons may enjoy this video work through the gallery window panes from outside the gallery. Print acquisitions from Mental Meteorites come with access to authenticated download of related video, Rock – Paper – Guillotine (buy a print; get the video compliment of the Artist). Select Mental Meteorites prints will also be on view in gallery window displays.
