Tony Oursler returns to Milan with his solo exhibition at Dep Art Gallery

The Volcano and Poetics Tattoo is the exhibition that Milan ’s Dep Art Gallery dedicates to Tony Oursler, eight years after the major retrospective held at PAC Open Obscura, curated by Demetrio Paparoni and Gianni Mercurio.

The exhibition, to be held from April 6 to June 1, 2019, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, will present to the public the most recent works of the American artist. For this exhibition, Oursler proposes three different approaches: the 3D video Le Volcan (2015-2016), thevirtual reality installation Spacemen R My Friended (2016), and the video installation Lapsed C with the photo-luminescent screen of Poetics Tattoo (1977-2017).

Works intended to experiment with the disorienting effects technology has on humans. The audience, with the help of special 3D visors, will find themselves immersed in the settings and among the virtual, alienating characters created by the artist. The gallery, in a striking dark setting punctuated by projections, will thus be “inhabited” by virtual and three-dimensional people and places.

“In the works exhibited at Dep Art, Tony Oursler continues his research on the relationship between psyche and technology, investigating the need of human beings to give answers to events perceived as mysterious. He thus highlights how humans are never satisfied with scientific explanations alone, manifesting a strong attraction to everything they cannot explain,” writes the curator in the exhibition catalog.

One of the works on display, Le Volcan, in 3-D, refers to the attempt of Commander Louis Dárget, an early 20th-century pseudoscientist, to impress the plate with the power of thought alone. The extensive re-enactment of the scenes is based on the artist’s interpretation of the research and is presented with the actual photographic image produced on that day by Darget.

The video Spacemen R My Friended, on the other hand, features the progenitor of UFO photography George Adamski and others who shared an interest in UFO photographs during the Cold War, testifying to the overlap in the human imagination of extraterrestrial worlds and the otherworldly, understood in a spiritual sense. With these works, Oursler traces his art back to the complex universe that springs from the spiritual dimension, resulting in several cases in beliefs, desires, dreams and pathological obsessions.

Finally, Lapsed C represents a reworking of photos and videos collected and recorded by Oursler and Mike Kelley during the years when they composed the experimental rock band “Poetics.” The film is projected on a specially treated screen that glows in the dark, which emphasizes the gothic quality of the phenomenon of persistence of vision and portrays the band’s relentless search for the place where Poetics’ final performance had been held, encountering the ghosts of punk and psychedelia. It is, for the most part, still unreleased footage, retrieved from the band’s archive, and never shown in public even in previous collaborations of the two artists.

For info: www.depart.it

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Free admission.

Source: release

Image: Tony Oursler, Le Volcan (2015-2016; still from video).

Tony Oursler returns to Milan with his solo exhibition at Dep Art Gallery

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