Marco Brambilla

The Italian-born, Los Angeles-based video artist Marco Brambilla creates works in large-scale video collages, including executions in 3D, incorporating colorful, over-the-top imagery that ranges from mass media and consumerism to ethereal and otherworldly realms. “My desire,” the artist says of his work, “[is] to present the most epic human themes in a way as immediate and bombastic as possible, seeing them all through a pop culture lens.” In all of Brambilla’s work there is a fascination with spectacle, recycled images, and the psychological state of a modern culture. In his piece

Civilization

the artist recreates the story of Dante’s "Inferno," utilizing a looped, 3-minute video that continuously scrolls upwards as if forever circling the ascent and spiritual journey from hell to heaven and back again. Set to an excerpt from Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” red, volcanic eruptions, nude bodies, Hercules-like men, floating blimps, the marshmallow-esque Stay Puft from Ghostbusters, and many other iconic images blend together to create an array of scenes that both fascinate in their hypnotic vividness and disturb in their accentuation of societal evolution in the age of technology. In contrast, Brambilla’s video

Flashback

, set in a 20-frame split-screen, weaves together Film Noir imagery, exploring subliminal collective consciousness in film and “the spectrum of human emotion and recall using the principles of cognitive psychology.” Brambilla has had exhibitions at institutions including the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Nevada Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

Watch an interview with the artist