Off-Screen - Luca Antonucci

Filmmakers fight to keep every second that something isn’t “happening” on screen. They understand the power of negative space, darkness, quietude, stillness, but the gears of the Hollywood machine and the nature of the medium don’t allow absence to linger for long; things must keep moving and actors must be on screen.

In Off-Screen, Luca Antonucci has frozen these moments, elongating them into still images so that the viewer can develop a more complex relationship with the literal architecture of storytelling. Wielding a Sony Mavigraph color video printer, a tool historically used to print sonograms and other internal bodily explorations, he borrows unoccupied rooms from a variety of films in order to consider what they might tell us about our construction of shared realities.

These prints exist on the walls of the exhibition but also in the form of a book, forcing the images into a new sequence: a series of moments that are the equivalent of holding one’s breath. Confronting these spaces of non-action over and over again, the book and exhibition document the physical shape of film, separate from narrative.