Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to present Titanic, A Deep Emotion, a solo exhibition, installation, and film by Claudia Bitrán. This marks the awaited New York City premiere of her remake of Titanic (1997) and the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition opens Friday, February 20th, and will be on view through March 28th. The artist will be present at the opening reception.
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 and deliberately visible production methods, Bitrán meticulously reconstructs the original film scene by scene at an intimate scale through DIY processes and spontaneous casting. 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.
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. Bitrán plays the leading role of Rose throughout the film, as the remaining cast shifts among a multitude of friends, volunteers, family members, and people recruited in public spaces. The process treats the blockbuster not as a fixed script, but as raw material—something to be disassembled, replayed, and reconfigured through innovation, repetition, and communal participation.
For its New York City premiere, Titanic, A Deep Emotion is presented as both film and installation. Paintings, sculptural props, drawn storyboards, hand-written 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 often deconstructs, rewrites, and represents mega-spectacles, injecting countless alternative emotional registers into these highly calculated spaces. The artist 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, 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.
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development, and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Our program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art. Education and audience engagement are central to our mission. Cristin Tierney Gallery is a member of the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America).
