At Artpace, Macchi presents a video installation and two print projects that explore the interdependence of verbal, visual, and sonic narratives. These works employ a formal language that oscillates between dynamism and stillness, progression and perpetuity.
The Ends, composed of five video loops on five monitors recessed within a table, investigates musical compositions arranged by chance. Conceived as a single voice in a five-part chorus, each video plays a different sequence of the same film finales. Because of the monitors’ placement, these Ends can be heard but not simultaneously seen. The resulting cacophony of overlapping scores creates a constantly changing musical canon. Integrating images, text, and sounds into a system hinging on the poetic potential of accident, this evolving round of never-ending endings presents a conceptual paradox.
Macchi’s print works, placed atop the table, examine the contradiction of simultaneous stillness and movement. Ten Drops, a flipbook, simulates the ever-widening concentric circles of drops falling on the surface of water. The circular holes each “drop” produces become passages into the medium itself. Each page represents a still of the cumulative ripples that extend beyond the volume’s physical boundaries.
In The Ascension, Macchi again plays with the possibilities of representing movement and sound in two dimensions by composing a book of sheet music devoid of notes. As pages turn, the lines of the staves float to the top, as if successively untethered from their pentagram structures. This ascent inverts the laws of gravity, transforming the foundational structure of music into a dynamic presence that functions only according to its own laws.
-Vanessa Davidson
Graduate Curatorial Intern
