Two of the lenticular dioramas from my Memento Mori series are being exhibited at the Palazzo Mora during the Venice Biennale this year, from May 9th to November 22nd. It’s the eighth edition of a group show called Personal Structures – Confluences, curated by the European Cultural Centre Italy, taking place across three venues.
Metempsychosis (2021) and Cataclysm (2023) are intricately constructed miniature theatres of remembrance, magical realist in tone, dealing with memory, grief, and what’s left of a person once everything else has gone. Each one is based on a real loss; not an idea of death, but that of an actual person I have known, loved, outlived and carried.
Lenticular dioramas are 3D image-objects that change as the viewer moves. You look into them rather than at them. The unusually dense and deep spatial compositions of these mean the image never settles. Details appear that suggest other narratives. They don’t photograph properly, as any attempt to capture them collapses the image into something thinner, flatter, easier. That failure is deliberate, though perhaps rather self-sabotaging. I’m just interested in work that has to be encountered in real space, in real time.
Visually, the work pulls from LA lowbrow as much as early Sienese painting. Scales slip, perspectives warp, time folds in on itself. The process is just as hybrid: early drawings become rough models; wax and clay figures are built, scanned, broken down, rebuilt; digital simulations generate smoke, dust, breath. The final images are printed using now-obsolete LightJet technology on Duratrans film, a final flowering of high resolution analogue tangled up with digital construction.
It's a big show, and quite a labyrinth. Make sure you get up to the very top floor, where these are!
