The Megaplex trilogy—Civilization (2008), Evolution (2010), Creation (2012)—investigates how Hollywood cinema functions as contemporary mythological apparatus. I accumulated hundreds of film fragments, stripped them of narrative context, and reorganized them into structures that reveal systematic patterns invisible when viewing individual films. The trilogy is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—institutional recognition that affirms the work’s significance as critical investigation rather than technical achievement. The trilogy spans what I describe as “the birth and death of the universe”—not as documentary project but as archaeological excavation of how spectacular culture produces the vocabularies through which we imagine existence itself.
My desire was to present the most epic human themes in a way as immediate and bombastic as possible, seeing them all through a pop culture lens. In Civilization, the structure traces Dante’s journey from Inferno through Purgatory to Paradiso—a vertical ascent through Hollywood’s accumulated depictions of transcendence. The work demonstrates that hundreds of apparently distinct blockbusters deploy nearly identical visual formulas for depicting movement from darkness to light, suffering to redemption. What emerges is not celebration of cinematic achievement but exposure of cinematic limitation: the same mythological vocabulary recycled across decades of supposed innovation.
Evolution extends this investigation horizontally. Referencing Natural History Museum dioramas and panoramic murals, the work organizes humanity’s history of conflict—explosions, battles, destruction, triumph—into panoramic procession. The horizontal scroll makes visible how cinema produces consensus mythology around human violence, the same gestures and spectacles accumulated until individual film recognition becomes impossible. What remains is pattern: the systematic production of conflict imagery as entertainment apparatus.
Creation spirals outward through DNA-helix geometry, tracing existence from cosmological origins through embryonic conception to Edenic paradise to inevitable decadence. The work references Charles and Ray Eames’ The Powers of Ten, but where the Eameses charted physical scale, Creation charts mythological scale—how Hollywood organizes narratives of origin and collapse according to limited structural templates.
The process begins analog. I arrange paper printouts on floor-length scrolls, marking positions for categorical territories—Hell here, Purgatory here, Heaven here. This cartography precedes digital execution. I watch four or five movies daily, usually in fast-forward, looking for elements to fill compositional requirements. A team of thirty people extracts characters frame by frame through rotoscoping. The final compositions contain 300 to 500 looping fragments, each rendered as brushstroke in moving canvas. “It’s like I’m making a video canvas where the brushstrokes are loops or samples taken from film.”
The loop structure is conceptually necessary. The loop considers time-based media as something not chronological—as cyclical rather than progressive. This suits the subject matter because all three pieces concern the circle of life: rebirth at the beginning, chaos returning to birth, the loop restarting. Spectacular mythology operates through this same cyclicality—perpetual regeneration of the same limited vocabulary. The loop makes this operation visible.
All three pieces are meant to be satirical. When Julie Andrews sings The Sound of Music to Prokofiev’s waltz, everything reduces to gesture and spectacle with hollow center. I’m interested in what becomes visible when you remove content and replace it with spectacle—when you take hundreds of millions of dollars of production value and combine it into new format. The work reveals that spectacular cinema has already performed this replacement. I merely make the operation legible.
The title “Megaplex” references multi-screen theaters opened in America in the 1980s, where content became interchangeable based on box office performance. This interchangeability is precisely what the trilogy investigates. If you go to a Megaplex movie theater now, the trailers often look like they’re made from the same film. Content has become slightly interchangeable. The work demonstrates this interchangeability through accumulation—proving through visual evidence what cultural criticism has long diagnosed theoretically.
My decade directing in Hollywood informs this investigation. I understand spectacular production from inside. I know how blockbusters are constructed, what visual formulas they deploy, how mythological templates get activated. This insider knowledge enables archaeological precision. The critique operates not from exterior judgment but from systematic reorganization of materials I understand intimately.
What I remember from childhood film viewing is not always what it was—there’s exploration happening, happy accidents occurring based on flawed memory. The work engages both personal and collective cinematic memory, revealing that what we remember as individual films actually constitutes systematic mythological production. The trilogy makes that system perceive itself.