In Daria Martin’s short color film Closeup Gallery, 2003, what we see is not what we get; we get more. Set in an ambiguous space and time, the film features a moustached man in a slick suit and an assistant in a fur-shouldered fishnet top, both looking knowingly into the camera as they demonstrate, and betray, the codes of card trickery. They work their way through a repertoire of illusions, disporting themselves with swift handwork as the camera, in a series of tight close-ups, whirls around them, the cards, and the spinning glass table upon which many of their stunts are displayed. The table then becomes the focus of our attention as—with the aid of low-tech film manipulation—black, red, green, and blue playing cards spin and gambol, forming flat, ornamental patterns and shapes suggesting high modernist painting. With its charmingly retro sensibility and thumping soundtrack, the film (part three of a trilogy) trenchantly explores the possibilities of contemporary artistic production through the lens of a gilded, and somehow not yet finished, past.
