Heaven's Gate is the latest in video artist Marco Brambilla's Megaplex series of video collages. A lavish and satirical take on the silver screen spectacle of Hollywood dreams and excesses, Heaven’s Gate both celebrates collective storytelling consciousness and satirizes its saturated glamour. The continuously looping video work ascends through the seven levels of Purgatory, each stage its own landscape of looping samples lifted from iconic moments of cinematic history.

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(...) In the work, Brambilla makes visible the concomitant tensions present in religion, industry and celebrity, ascension and fall, innocence and experience, vanity and pageantry, sexuality and awakening, simplicity and excess. Speaking the language of Hollywood’s dream factory, it communicates a nostalgia that feels at once familiar and uncanny and seemingly appropriate to the mood of 2020, where media saturation created a convergence of fact and fiction in a voracious cycle of introspection and collective anxiety. Heaven’s Gate likewise unravels into a dreamlike spectacle of virtual chaos. The work produces an overpowering labyrinth of labyrinths, a sinuous spreading visual maze seems to encompass the past and the future. In some way it involves stars.

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‘Marco Brambilla’s Labyrinth of Labyrinths’ essay by Daniel Birnbaum

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High-definition 3D video, loop. Color, sound.

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Image: Heaven's Gate by Marco Brambilla