Federico Solmi's 'The Great Farce' Takes Over Sunset Boulevard

Italian artist Federico Solmi (Bologna, 1973) presents 'The Great Farce' on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, California, from August 1 to September 30, 2018. The project, commissioned by the city of West Hollywood and produced by If Innovation Foundation (active since 2015 with over 50 public art interventions), consists of site-specific films shown on two-channel Tandem digital screens at 8410 and 9039 Sunset Blvd, running from 5 PM to 3 AM. Originally a nine-channel installation debuted in 2017 at the Biennial of Moving Image in Frankfurt, 'The Great Farce' was first presented at Open Spaces, the Kansas City biennial curated by Dan Cameron. Solmi's work combines traditional drawing, digital techniques, and gaming technology to critique politics as spectacle, featuring dictators and showbiz imagery. The artist, based in New York, explores themes of life as a pun of images, sounds, and colors, with politics as entertainment beyond good and evil. West Hollywood, located between Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood, is known for the Chateau Marmont (where John Belushi died in 1982), the Viper Room (Johnny Depp's club), and the hospital where Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor passed away.