Bio

For Seven and Five (2012), Miljohn Ruperto (b. 1971 Manila, the Philippines) commissioned copies of the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea, 1808–10), reproduced to scale in Dafen Village, Shenzhen, China, from a photograph of the original. These replicas are staged in dialogue with seven videos of Ruperto’s remake of a 1961 television episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled “Beta Delta Gamma,” rewritten by the artist but retaining the key elements of the original narrative. The episode centers on a college prank gone awry at a beach party, ending with the protagonist frantically digging in vain in the tide-smoothed sand in search of the body of a friend who he presumes is dead. The existential joke of this indeterminate ending, translated by restaging, provides an inverse parallel to the ersatz Friedrichs in their approximation of the sublime.