Tony Romano:
The Branch In The Salzburg Mines
Tony Romano is a Toronto artist (*1978) who graduated from Emily Carr in Vancouver and has shown regularly over the last ten years. Besides the 16mm film and sculpture you see here Romano makes 35mm films, photographs, drawings, recorded music, paintings, and works with sound and light.
The Final Crystallization (2014) is a 16mm film loop from a cast aluminum and chromed tree branch. The title is a nod to a key aspect of Stendhal’s theory of love, which Stendhal illustrated by relaying the story of a poetic gesture by Austrian salt miners: taking a tree branch down with them into the mine where they leave them over weeks and months to accumulate crystals, and then present as gifts to their wives and girlfriends. Romano’s film began the exhibition as pure white, imageless light and through running has gradually accumulated the content you see now. A soundtrack accompanies the loop in which we hear the artist repeatedly singing an acoustic version of Neil Young’s short song, Til The Morning Comes (from the 1970 album After The Gold Rush). Thus there is suggested a kind of perpetual suspension in a state of longing and anxiety, waiting for the (uncertain) arrival of the lover.
