Sanya Kantarovsky’s film A Solid House examines illusion in the realms of image-making, society, ideology, and at the very core of the self. In meticulously constructed computer animation, the film takes place in a dark, airless apartment, following the restless activities of a not-quite-human protagonist. Alternately bored and manic, the creature appears to be unable to leave. The apartment is filled with familiar trappings of late-capitalist consumer culture — Aesop hand soap, a Diptyque candle, and a clawfoot tub. There’s a Zeiss lens on a Sony camera and an unmistakable ding sound issues from the creature’s iPad which he impatiently ignores. Sequestered amongst a phantasmagoria of design and brand names signifying taste and class, the apartment and its appurtenances seem to update Walter Benjamin’s observation about the nineteenth-century bourgeois, that he “needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions.” Yet our creature is uncomfortable here, on edge, caught in a slapstick routine with the surrounding objects: it trips, bumps its head, and topples from atop a Thonet chair.
All images: Sanya Kantarovsky, A Solid House (still), 2022. HD video, 12:21 min. Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, and Stuart Shave Modern Art
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