Dead of the Living Night at Space 1026 is a mash note for horror movies with a surprise psychedelic candy-coated center.
Jonathan Cammisa and Jonah Birns, two former Philly artists now living in New York, collaborated on the installation of mock movie posters, dummy ghouls sprawled in front of a tv that plays clips from ghoul movies and a big black box with a video inside.
The piece de resistance is the black box that mimics, in its entryway, a video rental store with crap carpet on the floor and boxes of movies to rent on the walls. Past the entryway is the inner sanctum with a shaggy oversized stuffed animal on the floor (or at least the rump of the animal–I didn’t see a head but body is definitely there.) The animal faces a projection on the wall on which of a short video trip that takes you through the clouds and into a cosmic and psychedelic rumpus-romp with music that’s probably appropriated footage from Hollywood’s finest moments imagining the beauty of deep space.
It took the Space 1026ers who turned on the equipment for me a few minutes to get it all running but it was definitely worth the wait. The two referred to the shaggy beast and video in the psychedelia chamber as something out of The Neverending Story the 1984 fantasy movie — which doesn’t really fit with the horror movie theme of Dead of the Living Night. But actually that movie could be considered the second children’s horror movie, the first being the Wizard of Oz, of course.
This installation debuted at Live with Animals in Brooklyn.
