Sweet Ruin
2008
2-channel video projection, 16mm to HD, 10:00 loop projected from hard drive
Sweet Ruin is an experimental adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s unrealized script, Technically Sweet, written in the late '60s, but never produced. Set in the Amazon and Sardinia, it was to star Jack Nicholson as T., a disillusioned journalist obsessed with guns, and Maria Schneider as "The Girl." In two screens paralleling the dual plots of his script, Sweet Ruin imagines the ruins of Antonioni's work, as if it somehow actually filmed, but then lost and forgotten.
Meditating on love, violence and cinema, the installation was shot with out-of-date, damaged 16mm film stock, processed and edited to evoke fragments of hypothetical lost takes and shards of the abandoned script. Reclaiming and reinterpreting the original script, Subrin explores the psychological and gendered dynamics of relationships by blurring the lines between interiorized and externalized states of being, and casting an actress in both the Nicholson and Schneider role.
Featuring Gaby Hoffman as T. and The Girl
Sound Design by Taylor Thompson
Selected Exhibitions:
Anti-Establishment, Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York, NY
Elisabeth Subrin: Her Compulsion To Repeat, Sue Scott Gallery, New York, NY
Technically Sweet, PARTICIPANT, Inc., New York, NY
Technically Sweet, Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark