Works Presented on 80-foot Screens

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Artist Ellen Wetmore drew inspiration from Italy for her video "Frescoes."

01/27/2015
By Sheila Eppolito

“There’s a lot of art history walking around in my head,” says Ellen Wetmore, an associate professor in the Art Department.

She’s not kidding. Her latest work, “Frescoes,” showcases some of her thoughts through a set of videos inspired by the frescoes on the ceilings of the Uffizi museum in Florence, Italy. The videos mimic the tromp l'oeil scene effects, artificial surfaces, and collections of flora and fauna. 

For Wetmore, art is alive, not fixed.

“I like to imagine what happens next when I look at a piece — what happens to the couple, what changes might occur,” she says. 

Wetmore says the videos, shot in Haifa, Israel, and her hometown of Groton, “animate the stillness of museum pieces, and feature important themes like elisions of space, time and fantastic dysmorphia.”

“Frescoes” has been selected to be featured in Art on the Marquee, a collaboration between the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and Boston Cyberarts that puts rotating digital art on display on an 80-foot-tall multi-screen LED marquee outside the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in South Boston. Wetmore’s work was also featured in 2012, and her students’ work has also been selected to be featured as part of a student competition. 

While hundreds of thousands of Bostonians will experience her work on the large screens through January, it can also be seen at (https://vimeo.com/108671541) https://vimeo.com/108671541.