Winslow Garage

Gioj De Marco
Apogee

This four-channel site-specific video installation shows the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre's seminal existentialist play NO EXIT. Designed initially as a quadrophonic sound piece broadcasted from a dungeon in Northern Ireland, APOGEE evolved into a video adaptation where the characters speak with individual Morse code frequencies instead of voices. The actors enact the entire play, opening and closing their mouths at precisely timed intervals while sitting without moving or emoting. The performances eventually take a toll on the actors' bodies, paralleling the type of torture that Sartre's characters endure in the play, famously described as "hell is other people."

Gioj De Marco's multi-disciplinary art practice focuses on storytelling as a social grooming practice and how the plasticity of language reshapes the cultural landscape. The objects and experiences she develops are conditioned by existentialism, surrealism, 20th-century conceptual art movements, and cinema. De Marco lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is co-founder and co-director of Prospect Art, a forward thinking, not-for-profit visual arts organization.
www.gioj.org