Event

Zoe Beloff: The Somnambulists

An Exhibition On View in our Ancillary Salon and Stage, April 16 May 29, 2011
______
Opening Presentation and Illustrated Lecture
Saturday, April 16, 2011
8 o'clock PM

The Velaslavasay Panorama is pleased to present The Somnambulists, an exhibition by Zoe Beloff which will be on view in the Ancillary Salon and on the Stage of The Velaslavasay Panorama. The exhibition is comprised of five miniature wooden theaters onto which moving images are projected. The largest of these theaters will involve three-dimensional video projections of two vaudevillian musical dramas: A Modern Case of Possession and History of a Fixed Idea. Shot stereoscopically, the films depict three-dimensional figures, approximately one-fifth of normal human scale, that appear to perform on stage to hallucinatory effect, presenting the unconscious as a hysterical drama. For these films, Beloff was inspired by several remarkable developments at the end of the 19th century: the discovery of the unconscious by psychotherapists, the emerging practice of doctors filming their hysterical patients with motion picture cameras, and the public fascination with madness which manifested itself in the emotive, hysterical behavior of actors in Parisian cabarets.