Hothouse Video: Marina Zurkow

WPA partners with NY-based bitforms Gallery to present Hothouse Video: Marina Zurkow Hothouse Video: Marina Zurkow will feature six HD video animations which take the form of mesmerizing narratives posing uneasy questions about man’s intervention in the physical environment. This exhibition—Zurkow’s first solo show in Washington, DC—is centered around Zurkow’s epic Mesocosm (Wink, TX), a custom software-driven, hand-drawn animation which constantly recreates itself in an unchoreographed, unrepeating, and unending video. Observers ofMesocosm (Wink, TX) will never twice see the same imagery due to the video’s 146-hour, year-long cycle. Zurkow creates environments with a life of their own—programmed with the necessary information and images but allowed to change and adapt—like the world itself.

Mesocosm (Wink, TX) is a durational video, perpetually recombining and never repeating, inspired by a real-life sinkhole in the town of Wink, TX. Its landscape evolves over time, hosting a variety of animal life throughout the changing seasons and various geological events. Slurb, a similarly dark animation whose title is created from the conglomeration of “slum” and “suburb,” depicts the world as a dreamy ode to the rise of slime in a watery future where jellyfish have dominion. In The Thirsty Bird, Zurkow uses an array of archetypal individuals at a public water fountain that has been synchronized with a pump jack, each tirelessly spewing water and oil, respectively. Weights and Measures similarly highlights the disparate connections of the world, in this instance through airplanes, elephants, and plankton. Zurkow compares these proverbial apples and oranges to probe a system of relative values. Finally, in her Elixir series, Zurkow again creates an impossible landscape with a bottle holding metronomic figures of a woman rowing and young girl trying to fly with paper wings − forever fighting and dreaming, but forever encapsulated in a bottle.