Exhibitions

Venue: Videoclub, Brighton

Dates: 21st June 2007

Notes: Film screening, curated by Jeanine Griffin

Theorist Walter Benjamin saw early animation as a radicalising of film, which offered a release from the constraints of the physical laws of time, space and technology. A chapter of an early version of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was originally titled ‘Mickey Mouse’, about whom he said: ‘His life is full of miracles – miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology, but make fun of them’ Perhaps it is these original radical and avant garde possibilities of animation which still fascinate artists – ‘the anti-naturalist, utopian rebuttal of physical laws and ‘natural’ constraint’ (Esther Leslie) which allows reinvestigation of the relationship between the still and moving image, the flatness of line and the illusion of depth and the digital manipulation of photographic ‘reality’.

This is a smaller selection from a larger curated project which was originally presented as a videotheque at Site Gallery, Sheffield. The films presented here seem to show two poles of animation: drawn animation – coming from a primal flick book impulse involving line figuration – and animation referencing, remixing and intervening within film – still one of the most sophisticated animation technologies available to us.

Pat Flynn, UK Untitled, 10 min 45, looped Pat Flynn’s animation of a child’s mobile, recreates Ptolemy’s model of our solar system. The celestial bodies are reduced to small circular discs perpetually spinning around the Earth. The animation examines the aspiration and fear of looking outward, depicting an act of fantasy in relation to place.

Pat Flynn is an artist based in Manchester. Forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2006: Kunstraum Marion Scharmann, Cologne; Chapter, Cardiff and International 3, Manchester.

Mark Titchner , UK

Bedtime for Necromancy, 2 mins 51

“Bedtime for Necromancy is an appreciation of the true story of Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther who, while alone and feeling suicidal on the Meditteranean coast, claimed to see the faces of his revolutionary idols: Marx, Engels, Mao and Castro in the plains and craters of the moon. In Titchner’s version, as each vision fades into the past, becoming as much a myth as the man in the moon, he gives a reassuring wink as if to say, “Well we did our best - things didn’t quite work out the way we’d planned but, hey, no hard feelings. Just think of us every now and then.” The tune of Bob Dylan’s”Blowin’ in the Wind” ( played backwards but sounding hardly different to the original) underscores the video’s wistful, elegaic mood. While he is never so deluded to push for a revival of any one ideology, Titchner displays a palpable affection for declaredly progressive thought that proved too fast to live: Michael Wilson, Artforum, May 2005

Gubb, S. Mark, UK The Scooby Dead, 11 mins

The Scooby Dead came from an idea that the nasty video classic, Evil Dead would work very well as a Scooby Doo cartoon; both have the same number of characters and have the misfortune to be battling the undead. Armed with a computer and a pile of Scooby Doo DVD s I have created a Scooby Doo version of the Evil Dead www.smarkgubb.com/

J. Tobias Anderson, Sweden Where to I Go, 4 mins 46

A video that displays a man’s confrontation with his own self. A meeting that is not always as rewarding as one might have hoped. Classic film sequences have been re-cut and animated to illustrate this dilemma, and the final imagery is created in a highly contrasted style, with characters echoing of decades from long ago.

Cecilia Lundquist, Sweden C, 2 min 37 C is an animation that consists of five different, simply shaped scenarios. The separate scenes, presented by two drawn young girls, all reflect a slow change between something good and something evil. I want to show a possible outcome between playing children, when access, opportunity and an impulse of wanting to hurt somebody else appears at the same time. This evilness, that usually is well hidden within the feeling of innocence that a small child in general gives us, now and then shows its face and puts us in a complete state of shock and incomprehensibility.

Katya Davar, Germany Tubinger, 2 min 31

The animation “Tubinger” refers in an open way to the competitions between Russia and USA of sending out the first satellites. Russia has won this competition, because the have sent the first satellites named “Sputnik” in 1957. The world’s first artificial satellite was about the size of a basketball, weighed only 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race. Jason Dee, UK And the Band Played On, 2 mins

My work merges cinematic illusion and fantasy with film s surfacing mechanisms. I digitally alter film scenes, combining cinematic motion with single frames of foreground figures. This merger prevents the linear unfolding of the film narrative. Action must loop endlessly in a state of agitated stasis around the frozen characters, creating an uncanny impression of spatial and temporal dislocation.

I use 20th Century cinema as a pivotal point around which a two-way dynamic turns, comparing and contrasting pre-cinematic audio/visual technologies with today s new media. The use of loops, and a more discrete, layered relationship between space and movement, made possible by digital technology are paralleled by similar visual techniques found in 19th`Century apparatus, such as zoetropes and dioramas. This suggests a more cyclical aspect of media development, with technological and societal changes informing and influencing each other over a bedrock of universally resonant themes: love and desire, isolation and fear.

I source film scenes containing self-reflexive qualities (back-projections and recording devices). These clips reference elements of fantasy, romance and progress, which are paralleled by images of cultural and social techniques of control, such as hypnotic repetition and frameworks of observation and surveillance. Characters in these works are either frozen, or their actions are directly tied into the film s mechanisms, they seem mesmerized within the endlessly looping backdrops, somehow detached from, yet trapped inside them.

Craig Mulholland, UK Meeting Pop, 8 mins

‘Glasgow-based Craig Mulholland’s most recent works revolve around the theme of anomie - particularly how dehumanising the relationships between economy, society and the physical environment can be. His sophisticated and often cryptic practice interweaves traditional studio work with animations made using some of the latest software, whereby the artists drawings, sculpture, metalwork and paintings actively feed into the animations - an vice versa.’ Matt Price, Flash Art, Nov 2005

Craig Mulholland’s anagrammatic Meeting Pop, 2005, is a DVD loop that slices apart, re-edits and re-animates Peeping Tom, the 1960 British horror classic by Michael Powell. While Craig Mulholland s practice encompasses a range of media he considers himself primarily a painter and regards his films as a form of extended painting. He currently works with a complex configuration of media, including oil painting, meticulous digital animation and phantasmagorical tableaux. Born in Glasgow in 1969, Mulholland completed his BA in Drawing & Painting at Glasgow School of Art in 1991. Mulholland has exhibited regularly in group and solo shows in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London.

Ann Course and Paul Clark, UK Black Magic, 2 mins Ann Course makes her film works with the most modest means: drawing with a pencil or a pen on A4-paper, shooting with a simple video camera and often editing, rather than really animating The first thing that hits the eye is the pure or downright brutal honesty that emanates from these simple, but very strong configurations. Superficially, the powerful, bold contours she uses to put her figures down on paper resemble the doodles of a bored schoolboy, who vents his boredom and frustrations in an exercise book or on a school desk. Explicit sexual fantasies, mutilation scenes, grotesque faces, ridiculous transformations and the occasional line or two of cryptic text. And sometimes an abstract figure appears from nowhere. The drawings are apparently made without a purpose in mind, certainly not to please, more as an outlet for Ann Course’s own feelings of uneasiness and restlessness. And yet something doesn’t quite add up. The drawings transcend their explicit brutality. They express compassion just as much as they conjure up violence. (www.luxonline.org.uk)