Last Island, Sibyl Montague, (2009), courtesy of the Oriel Davies Art Gallery

Samantha Moore visits RE:animate, the Oriel Davies Open Exhibition 2010, running until 18 August 2010 at Oriel Davies, Newtown, Wales.

“At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.”[1]

The Oriel Davies Open exhibition is held every two years, opening this small contemporary art gallery about to artists from Wales and the border counties. For this themed exhibition however, the brief was opened up nationally and work was accepted from 39 artists, with themes emerging organically from the work submitted rather than invited.

There is a strong flavour of the magical quality of early and pre-cinema in RE:animate. Savinder Bual’s flickering 1 second looped Train (2009) makes reference to the Lumière brothers film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895). Ruth Martindale’s piece Papermaking Hampstead Heath (2010) is a flipbook and also a DVD of the flipping, the irregular brrrrmmm of the pages being thumbed past at odds with the slick modern flat screen it is displayed on. There’s even a magic lantern installation, Kate Allen’s Circle (2010) where a 35 mm slide projector slowly dissolves images of something which could be a hand, a ruined statue, a selection of geometric shapes or a landscape.

Sara Bjarland’s 2008 piece Blossom is equally low-tech. It is a video of balled up plastic bags unfurling/furling. There is a playful pleasure in the sequential images running both ways, a visual palindrome, and it reminded me of the Bergman quote above – the “dizzy sense of magic” when you first grasp the potential of moving images and willfully trick your eyes into believing what your brain can’t. Sharon Leahy-Clark’s Some made it, some didn’t (2006) also embraces the playful. It is an energetic sequence of primitive clay figures lined up on a narrow shelf, roughly formed and glistening with brights glazes, frozen in wild movement like hyped up toddlers. It makes movement real but isn’t moving, which seems counter-intuitive at an animation exhibition and yet fits with the sense of parlour game trickery.

The gallery space is dimly lit, mysterious with a theatrical quality. Part of this is inherent in the familiar gallery set up of boxed off faux-cinema spaces (there is one ‘box’ cinema and one gallery which is essentially a cinema), but there is also an inviting and appealing quality to the set up as you are drawn into the first gallery which mainly houses the non-time based work. Alex Boyd, curator of the show, is interested in the psychology of the gallery space, and the willing suspension of disbelief which people so happily acquiesce to with animation. This bending of the rules of reality which animation is so comfortable with is demonstrated in the piece which lures you into the space, Sibyl Montague’s Last Island (2009). A fragile pile of flour on the gallery floor, onto which is projected a loop of three characters scrabbling about in the dust. A circular mask on the projector silhouettes the flour hill against the wall behind. Montague references Plato’s Cave in this piece, with concerns about false ideas of reality and an inability to see the truth – interesting in the context of animation in any case.

Another Sara Bjarland piece Flight (2009) is a dead bee on a wire slowly rotating via a motor on a plinth. It brought back to me my childhood fear of animatronics (I blame that creepy cobbler dummy with his incessant hammer) and condensed the impression of the still representing movement, dead standing in for life. I have mixed feelings about this precinematic aura, in some ways it was exhilarating (pre-digital! look what you can do…) but in others it seemed to be a regression into a safer place, a refuge in archaic games.

Two artists’ works finally reminded me that refuges aren’t safe places for everyone; Annabel Tilley’s The second tallest tree in Josef Fritzl’s garden (2009) and Kristian de la Riva’s Cut (2009). Tilley’s work is a set of sequential pen and ink drawings, a repeated image of the very tip of a tree in the garden of the infamous Austrian man found guilty of rape, incest and the false imprisonment of his daughter and her three children. The blandness of the repeated imagery in cross hatched ink belies the context of the image and the fracturing of the cut off tree tip takes on sinister connotations. De La Riva’s Cut is a black and white rotoscoped looped video of a man cutting off bits of himself with various implements. The medium of animation allows a certain distance to be maintained between the acts (disembowelment, castration, slicing off kneecaps etc) and the empathy the audience feels with the bloodless, drawn performance of them. Eventually the relentlessness of the Itchy & Scratchy type violence became too much for me (it was the kneecaps that did it) and I backed off, wincing. Apparently it’s the most popular exhibit with children and young people.

The exhibition prize winners were Pia Borg’s Palimpsest and Sybil Montague‘s Totem. Both will get a gallery space for their own exhibitions in 2011, allowing and encouraging them to develop their practice in this area.

Footnote:
[1] Ingmar Bergman The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography translated by Joan Tate pub. Penguin Books (1989)

About the Author: Samantha Moore developed an interest in animated documentary as a form after making Success with Sweet Peas (2003). She subsequently made doubled up (2004) and  The Beloved Ones (2007). Her film An Eyeful of Sound  (2010) was a Wellcome Trust commission. Samantha teaches at the University of Wolverhampton and has given several papers on animated documentary. She is about to embark on a related Ph.D at the University of Loughborough.