More journeys by hot air balloon

Exhibition announcement:

March 5 - April 3
Lighter Than Fiction (2010) by Jenny Marketou (Greece/US)
Presented by the Project Room for New Media at the Chelsea Art Museum

The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, and the Project Room for New Media are pleased to present Jenny Marketou: Lighter Than Fiction. What do you see when soaring over Los Alamos, New Mexico... utopia or dystopia? A landscape of natural beauty or a place where nature was unleashed in the creation of the nuclear bomb? Jenny Marketou’s video installation poses the question, juxtaposing dreamlike perspectives with disturbing realities. These contrasting states are experienced in three single channel video projections that comprise the installation.

In “Stolen Bubbles” 2010 Marketou has mixed visual and sonic material from Karel Zeman’s “The Stolen Airship” 1966 with her original animation that draws from the airborne balloon project called “Bubbles” 2009 - both filmed over Prague, Czech Republic.

“Bubbles” is based on a public sculpture project where the artist created a remarkable set of 14-meter banners with her original graphic composition using the word “Fragile” which were draped onto an air balloon. Marketou filmed as she and her guests riding the balloon experienced breathtaking views of PRAGUE and the dream-like sensation of floating with the wind currents, hovering above the busy pace and anxieties of city life.

“Levels of Disturbance” (2009) is structured around the aerial audio and visual recordings that Marketou captured while flying in a small jet over the natural landscape around LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was created in the 1940s, that is still contaminated by nuclear waste and turbulent human emotions. During editing Marketou destroyed the order of the video sequence and the coherence of the narrative, placing at the center of each frame a round sphere animated in a perpetual motion that controls and obstructs access to the full image of the landscape. The viewer is drawn into this unsettling spinning sensation, generating metaphors for the human condition.

“Lighter Than Fiction” investigates the precarious balance between reality and fiction capturing the view from above where the lightness of utopian sensations and imagery are contrasted by dystopian realities.

Image: Still from Jenny Marketou's video animation “Levels of Disturbance” 2009