Reanimator

August 16–November 9, 2024

Lyndon Barrois Jr.
Andy Bennett
Maja Čule
Michele Gabriele
Rhonda Holberton
Gregory Kalliche
Coco Klockner
Filip Kostic
Collin Leitch
Olivia Mole
Harris Rosenblum
Andrew Ross
Nicole Ross
Frank WANG Yefeng
with objects by Fonco Studios

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All motion-based visual media is constructed from still images; film and video cameras do not record continuous motion but merely sample static points of time at brief intervals, relying on the brain glitch of persistence of vision to reconstruct the semblance of motion from these non-moving frames. In this sense, all film and animation is an illusion, a trick of the eye. The space in between two frames is a space of suture, of reanimating the lifelessness of static images.

Reanimator explores the idea of “animating” as emerging from the interpolation of space between static frames that both the brain and various image processing technologies perform. The exhibition also considers the ways in which the many technological systems that have developed around the representation of plasticity over the past century—predominantly emerging from the fields of cinema and animation—have, in turn, influenced visual and cultural aesthetics in other areas of cultural production. In this way, the exhibition constitutes a map of this influence, revealing the complex negotiations that determine what gets crystallized into an image and what kind of subjects are produced by the process.

Hybridizing museological display strategies with the vernacular of an in-situ production environment, the exhibition presents works from fourteen contemporary artists working in sculpture and media alongside a collection of production objects culled from the cinema and gaming industries. These non-art objects, drawn from the interstitial spaces of different production methodologies, map the often-unseen connections between technologic determinism and visual aesthetics.

By staging dialogues between these different arenas of output, Reanimator locates the uncanny echoes emerging from tropes and patterns of production that have become hard-wired into the visual regime of cinema and animation and considers the various ways they have, in turn, re-informed conceptions of fluid, speculative bodies. Collectively, the contents of the exhibition examine the complex feedback loops between our subjective imaginations and the supposedly rational technologies of visual representation.