Untitled (work in progress), 2020

Series of six photomontages. Ceramics and varnish on screenshots.

https://youtu.be/guOmJM8xvHA?si=ehlNFI0ttPrWjwsn

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Infinite Memory Loop  

Text by Zoe Stillpass

Let’s begin with an ending, the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970). In the last minutes of the movie, a luxurious house in Death Val- ley blows up over and over again. Consumer items such as a refrigerator, a televi- sion set, Wonder bread, Special K cereal, pool furniture, and resort clothing explode in slow motion, floating through the sky to the hallucinatory music of Pink Floyd. Of course, this is pure fantasy. The scene pictures the disillusioned protagonist, Daria’s, imagination. Daria rushes out of the house, disgusted by the capitalistic materialism that the home represents and looks back to envision its total obliteration. We see the explosion repeatedly from different angles; the same event varying slightly with each recurrence. Daria’s mind appears to look through a kaleidoscope, violently erupting in various possible combinations. In this way, she does not seem to look back on actual past events but rather looks forward to potential future outcomes. The film cuts to a close-up of Daria’s face. She smiles, then gets in her car and drives off into the seemingly infinite desert. We could say that this ending, therefore, speculates on new beginnings.

Stefania Carlotti has used this ending of Zabriskie Point as a starting point for her photomontage. For Untitled (work in progress), she photoshopped images of her ceramics onto screenshots of the explosions in the film. The ceramics depict generic objects from Carlotti’s everyday life - nail polish bottles, a slice of pizza, cigarette butts....; leisurely activities - a couple relaxes in a hot tub, sunbathers liquify in lounge chairs, picnickers nap among their picked over feast...; and, whimsical scenes of anthropomorphized animals - mice drink beers around a campfire, a dog sits regally at a dining room table, a giant frog has a tête à tête with a human on a sun bed. Perhaps some of these sculptures recall the artist’s fragmented memories or events that no doubt happened to somebody, somewhere at some point. Others represent daydreams, the stupid things you imagine when your mind wanders. Most of these sculptures, if you ever see them in real life, are relatively small. Their size and their ordinary, slightly kitschy subject matter give them the appearance of knick-knacks, purely ornamental objects. However, when seen in this photomontage, their dimensions and their material reality become unclear. How do we know that these objects ever actually had a physical existence? Did they stand before the camera or do they only exist as computer-generated images? To be sure, these unfinished sculptures have yet to be exhibited as artworks and will probably never reappear as they do here.

Similar to the last scene of Zabriskie Point, Carlotti’s photomontage presents a purely mental landscape. And, by placing these objects in the zero-dimensional space of the digital, the artist pushes their ambiguity and their instability to an extreme. In this anonymous space with no sense of place, the physical laws of the universe no longer apply. Untethered from material reality, these sculptures transcend their status as commodity objects and take on a life of their own as characters in possible narratives. Within this non-place, they have the potential to make unpre- dictable connections, allowing for the emergence of something new. Through digitalization, everything is capable of being continuously taken apart and recombined with other things in new ways. As such, these images involve nonlinear temporal relationships which disrupt, or blow up, the sequential order of things. They speculate on an unpredictable future open to infinite variations. Accordingly, they explore the pure potentiality of composition, of things that may or not come. In these scenarios, there is no ending.

Zoe Stillpass