The Dark Lining, Marco Brambilla's first solo museum exhibition, features seven major time-based works from 1999 to the present. Brambilla's oeuvre consists of complex video installations. Much of his work comprises found film footage edited, layered, and spliced to create compelling new narratives and stunning visual mosaics.

The exhibition at SMMoA features the premier of Evolution (Megaplex), 2010, a large-scale 3D video collage, which displays the history of humankind through the lens of cinema. Brambilla combines hundreds of clips from genre films that re-enact historical moments as grand spectacle. This cacophony of images is looped and mapped into an infinite three-dimensional environment that scrolls horizontally across time.

In a poignant work from 2002 titled HalfLife, Brambilla juxtaposes surveillance footage of gamers playing the then-popular video game Counter-Strike. By placing the young men in the “cross-hairs” point-of-view while simultaneously capturing their virtual actions inside the game-world, Brambilla highlights the physical displacement and the psychological dislocation inherent in entering the digital world.

Cathedral, 2008, in which Brambilla filmed Christmas shoppers in a Canadian mall, exposes raw footage in a long and slow sequence of kaleidoscopic patterning. The superimposed and multi-layered images transform the mall into a hallucinatory space.

Brambilla's Civilization (Megaplex), 2008, is dense with imagery and depicts heaven, hell, and in- between, in an epic, almost Dante-esque style, set to an excerpt from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. His first 'video mural' integrates clips into an expansive landscape that continuously scrolls downward, starting with the fires of hell, progressing through to celestial reward. Other works in the exhibition include Wall of Death, 2001; Sync, 2005; and Sea of Tranquility, 2006.

The ambitious installation design of The Dark Lining will mirror Brambilla's complex visual arrangements where the viewer is led, almost transported, from singular, theater-like stations to open spaces where multiple works present themselves in layered concert with one another. The exhibition presents multiple significant works from the last decade and illustrates Brambilla's artistic range and evolution.