NEW YORK, NY.- Cristin Tierney Gallery is presenting Titanic, A Deep Emotion, a solo exhibition, installation, and film by Claudia Bitrán. This marks the highly anticipated New York City premiere of her remake of Titanic (1997) and the artist's second solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens Friday, February 20th, and will be on view through March 28th.
For more than a decade, Claudia Bitrán has been remaking James Cameron's Titanic through an extensive collaborative process that spans film, painting, sculpture, drawing, animation, performance, and scenography. Using lo-fi materials, deliberately visible methods of production, DIY processes, and spontaneous casting, Bitrán meticulously reconstructs the original film scene-by-scene at an intimate scale. The project has involved more than 1,400 participants across the United States, Chile, and Mexico, who have contributed as actors, crew members, and collaborators, allowing the work to take shape and evolve through collective labor and improvisation.
Bitrán both plays the leading role of Rose and acts as the Director James Cameron throughout the film, as the remaining cast shifts among a multitude of friends, volunteers, family members, and people recruited in public spaces. The role of Jack is played by 40 different actors (representing a range of gender expressions, ethnicities, and ages). The process treats the blockbuster as raw material-something to be disassembled and reconfigured through innovation, repetition, memory, play, and communal participation. Rather than striving for cinematic realism and illusion, Titanic, A Deep Emotion embraces its artifice and foregrounds its process. Cardboard props, painted backdrops, and makeshift environments remain exposed, while characters and scenes transition seamlessly between animation and live action.
For its New York City premiere, Titanic, A Deep Emotion is presented as a three-channel film installation. Paintings, sculptural props, drawn storyboards, notes, painted scene stills, and material remnants extend the work into the gallery space, framing the screening and emphasizing the film's construction. Its kitsch and self-crafted components serve as commentary on the excess behind pop culture phenomena and are a timely metaphor for the perils of human hubris.
Claudia Bitrán (b. 1986, Boston, MA) works primarily in painting and video, frequently using DIY aesthetics to catapult herself into the hyperbolic world of social media and pop productions. Through labor, play, humor, and experimentation, she deconstructs, rewrites, and represents mega-spectacles, injecting countless alternative emotional registers into these highly calculated spaces. The artist-who was also a Britney Spears impersonator on Chilean reality TV show Mi nombre es-holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013) and a BFA from the Universidad Católica de Chile (2009). Bitrán has held solo exhibitions at KIOSK Cultural Center in Ghent, Belgium; Cristin Tierney Gallery and Signs and Symbols Gallery in New York; Walter Storms Galerie in Munich, Germany; marytwo gallery in Lucerne, Switzerland; Muhlenberg College Gallery and Practice Gallery in Pennsylvania; Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico; the Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York; and at Museo de Artes Visuales in Santiago, Chile.
Grants and awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship in Visual Arts, The New York Trust Van Lier Fellowship, Hammersley Grant, Emergency Grant for Artists Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Filmmakers, 1st Prize Britney Spears Dance Challenge, 1st Prize UFO McDonald's Painting Competition, and 1st honorable mention at Bienal de Artes Mediales, Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile. She has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, the Smack Mellon Studio Program, Outpost Projects, and Pioneer Works, among others. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
