Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Marco G. Ferrari
Visual artist :: filmmaker :: curator :: educator
“Alterity and The Landscape”
In light of environmental concerns and social issues, there seems to be a deepening divide between our connection to each other and the natural world. Can the process of creating and exhibiting moving image works provide a method to find a greater understanding and bring us closer to the world around us?
In connection to his exhibition in the lobby of 737 N. Michigan Ave., artist Marco G. Ferrari will present and discuss his recent and current films and videos, installations and curatorial projects that look at the complexities, and perhaps the inability, of creating and exhibiting moving image works with the intention of revealing our spirit level. From documenting the Costa Concordia shipwreck, to producing outdoor video projections on Chicago’s south-side, searching for a story on the shores of Gujarat, India, organizing a Video Art exhibition in Carrara, Italy, and adapting a Greek tragedy for screen, these projects hinge on the paradoxical idea of signifying an otherness while also wanting this difference to fade away.
Marco G. Ferrari (b. 1974) is an artist based in Chicago, Illinois. He builds films, installations, digital images, video projection performances and music that explore our relationships with place and time, to probe how identity is shaped by tensions raised by our attachments to or de-attachments from our built and natural environments. Intermixing documentary and fiction film techniques, Ferrari’s work projects external narratives of absence and presence to elicit an internal narrative of alienation. The tension between these narratives raises questions about the structure of culture and the nature of thought, and illuminate qualities of a common experience. Yet the works also yield something of the mysterious. This narrative tension, rendered through the poetic use of the camera, minimal compositions, and video projections within different spatial contexts produce an experience at once meditative and disorienting, but in the end, human. Upholding a ‘cinema of imperfection’ that reveals the materiality of the image, Ferrari’s work seeks to move beyond a perceived transparent reality to a place of visual plasticity and sublime emotional experience.
Screenings of his films have been exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna–Palazzo Forti and Grafiche Aurora in Verona, Italy, the Athens International Film and VideoFestival in Ohio, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the University of Chicago Delhi Center in India.
Ferrari received his MFA from the University of Chicago in Visual Arts and his BA from DePaul University in Communication and Italian Studies. He currently balances his artwork as an independent curator, teaching at John Cabot University (Rome, Italy) and Franklin University Switzerland, freelancing as a videographer and VJ, and managing Ferrari Studios, a collaborative studio space in Chicago and Guardistallo, Italy, shared between himself and his father, sculpt or Virginio Ferrar.
