Then zoom became drone, a two-person exhibition with Los Angeles-based artists Patricia Valencia and Emmett Walsh, will present a new three channel video installation, a publication, and sculptural works. The exhibition takes its title from a line in Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf’s final novel published in 1941 after her suicide. It is the artists’ first project with Tropico de Nopal Gallery.
Serving as the central core of the exhibition, the video installation – titled 12/21/12: Illuminations – documents the sunrise of the 2012 winter solstice projecting a column of light through the interior of a Mission in northern California. The church’s purposeful architectural alignment and presumed motives are investigated through slow, detailed shots of light and shadow playing on the man-made construction.
The accompanying publication is hinged upon a written essay that collects together circumstantial histories and notes on celestial alignments that revolve around the annual event of the sun dissecting the building. Themes discussed include the apocalyptic misreading of Maya cosmology, Western enlightenment tactics of religious conversion, the advent of computer-generated imagery alongside experimental film works of light and colour, and the uncovering of both ancient and contemporary attitudes towards mortality.
Then zoom became drone will draw together works that deal with light and the abstraction of imagery both mundane and profound, raising questions about the human preoccupation with gathering mineral and spiritual wealth.