Sanya Kantarovsky's Video Installation 'A Solid House' at Aspen Art Museum Explores Obsession and Ego

Sanya Kantarovsky presents 'A Solid House' (2022), a video installation at the Aspen Art Museum, on view through April 2. This work marks a departure from his known paintings, featuring a computer-generated simian protagonist fixated on Jacques-Louis David's 1793 painting 'The Death of Marat'. The 12-minute video intercuts 16mm film of nature scenes with HD footage of a bourgeois home filled with aspirational items like luxury candles and coffee-table books. Narration from Chögyam Trungpa's 1970–71 Boulder lecture series describes the monkey's ego-driven attempts to construct a coherent self, attaching false values to reality. In a jarring scene, the creature films itself in a bathtub while watching US air strikes in Afghanistan on an iPad, highlighting violence used to sustain delusional worldviews. The installation includes a path of battery-operated tea lights leading to a long couch in a dark enclave. David's painting idealizes Jean-Paul Marat, a radical French politician murdered in his bath, advancing the Reign of Terror. Kantarovsky's work critiques how external phenomena, such as flattering images or ideologies, are obsessively aligned with to project moral superiority, ultimately exposing the flimsiness of constructed realities as the film's world splinters into abstract closeups and screeching sounds.