© Gregory Crewdson
CONTACT Gallery 80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 310 M5V 2J4 Toronto, Ontario Canada
«With La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini broke with the neorealist tradition of filming on location, and moved to Cinecittà Studios, where he built a near-exact replica of Rome's famed Via Veneto. Cinecittà, then known for hosting American epics like Ben Hur, would become inextricably linked with the great director.
In this series of photographs, artist Gregory Crewdson revisits Fellini's stomping grounds, documenting a cinematic ruin where narratives linger like ghosts. The traces of bygone productions are everywhere: a painted sign, perhaps from Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York; flooded alleyways that evoke HBO's Rome.
Crewdson----known for highly staged, fantastic photographs----chooses to dwell on the gaps in the fragile illusions of these film sets. Scaffolding can be seen supporting each structure. Modern high rises can be glimpsed behind an ancient cottage.
Mussolini once described Cinecittà as the place where "dreams become reality." For Crewdson----like Fellini before him----it is a place to revel in the dreamlike nature of reality itself. »
---- Michael Connor, Exhibition Curator
Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962, lives and works in New York) is internationally renowned for his elaborately constructed, surreal scenes of small town America. His large-scale colour photographs psychologically reference the movies by iconic filmmakers such as David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stephen Spielberg. Museum and public collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the V&A Museum, London. A retrospective of his work, spanning his career, from 1985 - 2005, was shown as a traveling exhibition from 2005 - 2008, at major museums in Europe. Another travelling exhibition of his work opened at the Kulturhuset Museum, Stockholm, in February 2011, followed by Sorte Diamant, Copenhagen and c/o Berlin, Berlin.
Vignette : © Gregory Crewdson