This work cross references themes from the films “The Mirror”, “Nostalghia and “The Stalker” by Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky created in the 1970s and 1980s. Common themes of the despoliation of nature, industrial degradation, material and spiritual poverty combine with the themes of salvation through faith and art and have if anything an even greater relevance today than the time they were made.
The Breughal painting “Hunters in the snow” is a study of a quiet apocalypse painted during the little ice age, this has been combined with an image of “The Zone” from the Tarkovsky film “The Stalker”. The painting is explored in panoramic slow motion detail in the science fiction film “Solaris” and also in “The Mirror” where it serves to provide a distant perspective of a frozen civilization that seems almost archeological. The rear layer of the work contains a blended image of a staged Breughal painting from the film “Mirror” and a view of the interior of the spaceship. The work brings together the otherworldly and liminal spaces of cathedral, spaceship and the ruined soviet industrial space of “The Zone”. “The Edifice built by Tarkovsky in each of his films is structurally, semantically and functionally a cathedral” Elena Dulgheru.
