Giovanni Ozzola’s Industrial and Desert Visions Come to the Subtropical Island of Hong Kong

While Ozzola’s art spans sculpture, photography, and video, at Art Central he is represented through a selection of large-scale, color stills taken from his meditative video works. Ozzola is driven by his interest in our place in the universe—enormous when compared to an ant’s, infinitesimal when contextualized by time and outer space—as well as the seemingly ungraspable concept of infinity. He is fascinated by light, which often suffuses his work, or, sometimes, is absent from it. 

Garage-Sometimes You Can See Much More (2009–12) encapsulates these shifts from darkness to light. In one part of the video viewers are presented with the dark striations of a garage door, with a glowing stripe of light bleeding through at the bottom of the frame. A clattering and squeaking sound preempts more motion, and the lines of light slowly expand into a glittering navy blue ocean, and eventually, a grey-blue sky. The doors pause, and we see the take in the vast, calm scene, and what appears to be an unreachable horizon. Suddenly, the clattering and squeaking resumes, and the doors slowly shut out the seascape and return to the dark garage.