Marco Brambilla was thinking big in "Civilization," his Hieronymus Bosch-inspired video collage that's spurred an ongoing conversation among the patrons ascending to the Boom Boom Room in the elevator of New York's Standard Hotel where it has been on permanent display. Kanye West saw it and asked Brambilla to direct a music video for his song "Power," which has garnered more than a million viewings on YouTube.
As for the video-making process, Brambilla explains, "I would show Kanye Photoshop frames of these different old master paintings and then I would go to the castings and the models would be posed in similar positions and then I would do a collage of that, shoot the models in slow motion and then combine all that." As for the singer himself, Brambilla finds him "Very interesting. He draws from art, fashion and usually pushes people to create something that is richer than it would have been without him. The video really came from the song. I thought it would be really great to do a portrait of him using that technique and putting him in a crazy neo classical setting."
Now Brambilla's taking it to another level by adding 3D and tackling the subject of "Evolution" as envisioned by someone who has spent many an hour at the Museum of Natural History. Using samples from his extensive film archives, Brambilla first composes the entire canvas as a photo collage, works with a special effects company to place film loops on top and then projects it on a 3D landscape.
"Evolution (Megaplex)" will premiere at the Standard Hotel in Miami on Friday, at a party hosted by André Balazs and Jefferson Hack that West is rumored to be attending as well. The result is a supersaturated overload of images that's sure to hold your attention.
The second part of the trilogy will be shown in May 2011 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (where the artist will be having a retrospective), but Brambilla chose to preview it at Art Basel Miami "because it has become such a crazy phenomena. People go for a variety of reasons not all of them art related. I thought this piece specifically would work there because it depicts this bombastic view of the world, and would work in that setting."
