Scenario I: Dancin' In Heaven

Danielle Campbell, Fidencio Martinez, Dain Mergenthaler, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez

Curated by Danny Floyd for ACRE March 4 - March 25, 2016

I was standing in my living room talking with my roommate when we found ourselves characters in an unexpected drama. He was mid-sentence, “After we talk I am going to attend to...” Then a loud boom sounded form the northwest. “...that.” We ran to the back window and saw an enormous cloud of smoke pouring off the roof of a silo we assumed was abandoned and drifting over the Stevenson Expressway. Everyone in our block was looking out their back windows shouting and pointing. My roommate joked that maybe Michael Bay was in town. We found out a few days later that that was exactly the case, and that the explosion was for the filming of Transformers 4.

For a brief moment our neighborhood was turned into fictional setting. Because the situation was so cinematically and theatrically timed (and because it actually was a movie shoot), we were simultaneously in a movie and in real life, performing our curiosity, excitement, and confusion. The thin veneer of the back wall and windows of my block's building even resembled a stage set or a matte painting in a film – a dense, active world in low relief.

The work in this show presents subjects performing the relationship between themselves and their surroundings, and in the process challenging the distinction between the real and the imagined. Fictitious characters re-perform text from real life to create a altogether new reality. Maps create a setting out of the earth's surface, manifesting invisible boarders with real, political consequences for the players who traverse them. The fantastical is inserted into the everyday, and the everyday finds itself in fantastical worlds.