A Video Art Exhibition by
MARCO G. FERRARI
Show Statement
The word “nacelle” means the streamlined car of an aircraft—from the Latin navicella, meaning “a little ship.” In the film Nacelle, Ferrari traces an idea in formation and the complexities that arise within a contained space as a vessel travels from point to point, where a movement from thought to feeling is cycled through.
The first part of a trilogy, Nacelle is about a fictional B-roll film crew stuck in the back of a moving truck that travels across five Chicagoland locations: the Byron Nuclear Generating Station; a DeKalb Wind Turbine Farm; the Cook County Department of Corrections’ Division XI Facility; Lower Wacker Drive; and Miller Beach, Indiana. As the line producer, camera operator, soundman, driver and the locations interact, the fragility of their relationships is exposed, and a reaction is triggered. Sound and vision question, concept entangles, the environment informs, and desire drives the picture.
Filmed in digital video and 16mm film during Ferrari’s final quarter in the MFA program at the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, he worked with five artists: three as actors; one as actor/art director/production assistant; and an assistant director/camera operator. Ferrari’s previous films are rooted in the use of documentary shooting techniques combined with an exploratory method of montage that builds meaning through the assembly of images and sounds. Often working alone and without a fictional construct, as in the video D(z)iga (featured in the exhibit), in this work he reversed the approach, and explored a narrative method: writing a script, building dialog and action through rehearsals, and sharing the creative process with a cast and crew.
The exhibition juxtaposes two formal methods that explore how the tension between feeling and thought is formed by our relationship with our natural and built environments, and asks if an awareness of place can provide a resolve.