Continuing through November 21, 2026
The young Charlie Chaplin shot his silent comedy “The Tramp” (1915) on location in Niles Canyon and at a local studio in the Niles district of Fremont, about 35 miles southeast of San Francisco. It was at this western outpost of the Chicago-based Essanay empire, in a now forgotten studio, where the silent movie era’s most famous character was brought to life. “The Tramp” was Chaplin’s first film with a sad ending. It defined the true essence of the “Little Tramp” by infusing slapstick comedy with pathos and melancholy. The silly troublemaker, who had previously appeared in “Kid Auto Races at Venice” (1914), had evolved into a more complex figure. He became that romantic outsider who meets rejection and misfortune with unwavering optimism and, thanks to his mischievous nature, outwits authority with humor.
It is also the title given to this exhibition by Caguiat Delacruz (a collaboration between Justin Caguiat and Rafael Delacruz, who also work individually), which makes no mystery that the show pays tribute to Chaplin’s lovable drifter. They have created an experimental film that playfully reinterprets the character of the Tramp. Dressed in the character’s signature bowler hat, fitted coat, and baggy trousers, actor Wesley Hrubes (with his dog, Chips) and Butoh dancer Hiroko Tamano roam the streets of Oakland and the rural surroundings of Half Moon Bay. Tamano peers out from a dense field of sunflowers she is wading through. Wesley wakes up behind a bush by the roadside, lifts Chips out of a crate, and carries the animal away with him.
Digitally recorded, transferred to VHS, and played back on a modified VCR controlled by computer automation, the film fast-forwards and rewinds arbitrarily between short scenes. As viewers, we encounter an endless loop that re-edits itself in real time, making it impossible to predict what will appear or when. Scene changes are introduced by signal interference on the analog television set: streaks cut across the image, and the screen goes black before a new sequence appears. A blend of field recordings, interspersed with fragments of music and dialogue, begins to play only when the image starts to flicker and fade away.
Evoking Chaplin’s silent films and reflecting his skepticism regarding the use of sound in cinema, none of the scenes in the 2016 reimagining of “The Tramp” have an audio component other than the distinctive blend of mechanical and electronic tones of the running VHS tape. The soft clacking and whirring make the materiality of analog technology, provoking nostalgia for legacy media. Even though the brief segments may recall today’s fast-paced attention economy, any underlying logic of consumption is disrupted by the glitches and black screens between scenes. Moreover, the silence of the images demands a patient audience. Vulnerability, idleness, and the charm of the imperfect lie at the heart of this film, which thrives more on atmosphere than on plot.
There is a grotesque moment in which an oversized skeleton lounges in the corner of a room, filling the small space right up to the ceiling, while one vagrant pushes the other in a wheelchair to the foreground. With just a few rough brushstrokes, the wooden walls of this setting suggest a white-painted room. Its raw aesthetic now defines the atmosphere of the space where the film is screened, as parts of the stage sets were repurposed for it. The sets also find new uses as furniture, pedestals, or sideboards, serving as platforms to display sculptures clad in the film costumes, as well as prints, photographs, and ephemera. Caguiat Delacruz shifts the focus of artistic production from finished artifact to the process of creation, in which remnants persist and are continuosly re-used. This approach also applies to their collaborative painting practice, which often employs collage and, in some works, involves layering a loose canvas over a canvas already mounted on a support, which itself may previously have been a different work. This uncommon mixed-media technique can be found in “Terminal” (2026). From a distance, the painting radiates an almost monochromatic orange hue. Up close the outlines of a group of figures become visible along with other scattered, indistinct shapes. They shine through from beneath the top layer of paint. As with the film, there is no rigid formula. The collaborators open up to unpredictability as the path to freedom.
A discarded timepiece included in one of the installations recalls the opening shot of Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936), a large clock face in close-up, ticking steadily. For Chaplin’s Tramp, time increasingly becomes a source of torment and punishment. He works feverishly on the assembly line but cannot keep up with its speed and so loses his job. “Modern Times” is a partial “talkie” that marks the Tramp’s last appearance. Towards the end of the film his voice is finally heard, yet it remains unintelligible. He sings a song in poly-lingual gibberish, signaling Chaplin’s resistance to adapting his silent persona for a new era.
“Modern Times” deals with the struggle to escape alienation and preserve human dignity in a mechanized world. In a similar spirit of resistance, the clock in Caguiat Delacruz’s version of “The Tramp” displayed the wrong time and had stopped ticking altogether, thereby exiting a world that is continuously accelerating.
