Heather Gaudio Fine Art is delighted to present “Simona Prives: Even While the Dust Moves,” a multichannel video installation held at the PROJECTS space. This display acts as an extension of “A Sense of Place,” an exhibition simultaneously on view at the gallery on 66 Elm Street. The video projections tie in the still works by Prives which are showcased alongside works by Tegan Brozyna Roberts and Viviane Rombaldi Seppey. Both exhibits open on August 14th and will run through September 25th.
Moving image and sound come together in this new site-specific video installation by Prives. The wall-projected digital collages reference current and historic locations, scenes from nature and urban landscapes from her home in Brooklyn and its environs. The artist’s ink and pencil drawings appear to draw themselves on and off in stop motion, melding with other moving textures that materialize and fade away. Imagery continuously emerges and disappears in a type of surreal stream of consciousness. An important feature in Prives’s work includes the presence of human activity: ghost-like tiny acrobats, dancers, rock climbers and the like animate the landscape and seem to be vintage recordings from a bygone era. These clips are in fact videos Prives personally shot and directed via Zoom last year during the pandemic.
Prives combines these snippets of film with industrial and natural imagery, sourced from multiple mediums such as blueprints, topographical maps, even prints she created herself. Each separate element comes together to create a moving collage consisting of hundreds of layers of projected imagery. The results are fantastical, dreamlike narratives depicting the ebb, flow and demise of civilizations, the evolutions and changes in the natural landscape and the complex relationship humans have with the environment. As with previous video installations, Prives collaborated with Australian composer and sound designer Ross Williams who works across a range of media. His audio collage pieces employ found sounds, field recordings and transformed infrasound. Synchronized to Prives’s projections, the sounds are designed to evoke a type of cinematic memory.
Of note, Prives is currently presenting a related installation in monumental scale in New York City. Her multi-media works are in many private collections. Prives holds an M.F.A from Pratt Institute, is a part-time faculty member at CUNY, NYU and Parsons School of Design and has participated in several artist residency programs.
