Pittsburgh, U.S. – June 2025 – Mattress Factory, a leading contemporary art museum and international residency program based in Pittsburgh’s Northside, is proud to present two new solo exhibitions at its 1414 Monterey gallery, opening June 28, 2025. The exhibitions, by artists Vivian Caccuri and Rebecca Shapass, were selected through the museum’s Regional Open Call and curated by Irene Campolmi, a Copenhagen-based curator and researcher.
The public is invited to a free opening celebration and block party on Friday, June 27, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Rebecca Shapass is a New York City-based filmmaker and visual artist who invites viewers to contemplate the strange beauty and unsettling implications of technological preservation in her immersive installation Tempus Fugit. At the core of the exhibition is a meditative film that juxtaposes imagery of a cryogenics facility with Shapass’s late grandmother’s house—kept intact after her passing and before being emptied for sale. The result is a haunting portrait of suspended time, as the film and its accompanying sculptural elements explore themes of mortality, memory, and transformation. Shapass fuses observational and structuralist cinema traditions with gothic motifs, drawing on everything from Dracula’s haunted castles to speculative alchemical reanimation. The installation is built around tactile materials—mirrors, crystals, and even style vintage carpeting—to evoke a space that feels both familiar and uncanny. Tempus Fugit is a meditation on the desire to outlast our “natural” expiration date, and the uncanny potential of technology to reanimate what has been lost. Brazilian artist Vivian Caccuri makes her Mattress Factory debut with I Can Hear My Blood Singing, a video and sound installation that transforms the body’s inner rhythms into an audiovisual experience. The piece begins with sound captured from Caccuri’s own body—heartbeats, digestion, breath—recorded using a digital telescope microphone. These recordings are transmitted through subwoofers that animate long black silk ribbons, making visible the artist’s internal world. Suspended in this sonic environment are ghostly projections: looping hand-drawn animations of nude figures stretching, falling, and disintegrating. These figures, drawn digitally yet gesturally, dance in sync with the body’s sounds, forming a kinetic, ephemeral portrait. The silk in the installation serves as both skin and screen—an abstract visualization of the forces that hold us together. In this deeply personal work, Caccuri explores the relationship between inner life and outer form, crafting a poetic and visceral self-portrait that invites viewers to feel rather than see. | 
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