The European Rooms

Please join us for a special screening of The European Rooms, a short film by media artist David K. Ross that presents intimate views of Enlightenment-era architectural interiors featured in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Rooms. In Ross’s newest work, an unhurried camera glides across drawing rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, and entrance halls filled with finely crafted furniture and carefully selected objets. Though well-appointed, this "sealed and stifling" world of privilege, class, and prestige is also inescapably uncanny and oneiric. A slow unraveling of cinematic, sonic and architectural space played out in real time, The European Rooms is as confounding as it is elucidatory. David K. Ross will provide introductory remarks to the film screening.

David K. Ross works in a variety of media including film, video, photography and installation, and is based in Chicago and Montreal. His formal training as an architect and his experimentation with large format photography and film have resulted in a wide range of projects investigating the history of optical technologies and geodetic practices, museum taxonomies and transport systems, self-storage facilities, and urban infrastructures. Ross's work has been exhibited in major institutions in North America and Europe, and are included in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His films and videos have been shown at CineMarfa (2012), Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (2013), and the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara (2014).

Image: David K. Ross, The European Rooms, 2014. Production still, HD video, 27:30. Courtesy David K. Ross.