Keep On Moving, Don't Stop
Michael Bell-Smith
Espen Friberg
Vidya Gastaldon
Ezra Johnson
Yui Kugimiya
Takeshi Murata
Adam Shecter
Curated by Hanne Mugaas
Commissioned by Public Screens, Stavanger, Norway
Keep On Moving, Don't Stop presents seven young artists from USA, Japan, Switzerland and Norway who are working with animation. In a world where extreme 3D animation is the norm, both in Hollywood, video games and on the Internet, and where it is currently difficult to spot the difference between an animated character and a real life actor, it is interesting to look at how artists are utilizing the media and expanding it into new territories.
The artists included in Keep on Moving, Don?t Stop represents a new generation of artists who grew up with TV, video games and the Internet, and are currently working critically with digital tools. The project involves animations utilizing digital video tools, effects, and hacks to visualize and manipulate the effects of technological development upon art and popular culture, and further animations that explore the traditional media of painting and its possibilities for transformation through animation.
Animation is an optical illusion of movement. The first efforts of illustrating movement, what we could call pre-animation, were cave paintings of animals with multiple sets of legs. The first animated film on reel was produced two million years later; Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, directed by Stuart Blackton in 1906.Traditional animation, or hand drawn animation, was thereby born, and Walt Disney took the media to new heights with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first commercial successful animated feature. (Walt Disney won an Academy Award for the movie, consisting of one big and seven small Oscars). Today animations are made with CGI (Computer Generated Imagery), computer programs which have revolutionized the industry. 3D modeling on a computer has taken over from drawing-by-hand.
Artists have been working with animation since way back in time, either as part of their work, or as their full time media. Most of the artists in Keep on Moving, Don?t Stop are working with animation as their main subject matter, but in very different ways.
Michael Bell-Smith's digital videos explore the increasing circulation of images and digital material, from the very first video games to the latest computer programs. Bell-Smith?s work is incorporating the vocabulary of the Internet (animated GIF?s and low quality images), and the aesthetics and semiotics of computer programs such as Powerpoint and websites such as Youtube. Bell-Smith is reevaluating the cultural meaning of this material through the appropriation of commercial videos, classical film and contemporary art. In Action Hack, Smoke Screen, On the Grid and Grid Panic, he utilizes readymade moving images from commercial sources, put together into an abstract whole.
Espen Friberg has for several years worked with graphic design and illustration as part of the
Norwegian collective Yokoland, in collaboration with Aslak Gurholt Ronsen. Friberg is currently working as an artist, illustrator and designer, working with books, magazines, exhibition design and commercials. Friberg has always been working with comic strips, and for Keep On Moving, Don?t Stop he will produce a new comic strip slideshow for the screen.
Vidya Gastaldon is in her work creating new worlds, often utilizing new age iconography and religious symbols. Gastaldon is making use of a complicated system of multiple references and links in her works, including signs and material from religion, mysticism and popular culture. In Reequilibreur- Generateur she uses signs and forms that have been said to be balancing, relaxing and healing on human beings. Her hope is that the video will have these effects on the viewer.
Ezra Johnson is exploring the possibilities of painting through animation. Johnson is not using painting to create animation, painting is his main focus and animation is a tool to experiment with the media ad its tradition. Johson?s animations are created through painting over and over the same surface, which then ends up as a digital animation. In Wrestling the Blob Beast we see his struggle with painting spelled out literally, as Johnson has painted in his own hands wrestling the different shapes and colors.
Yui Kugimiya is another artist who is working with the media of painting through animation. Experimenting with texture and colors through stop motion animation, Kugimiya looks at her animations as “living paintings”. An important aspect of her work is her experimentation with texture, using sand, stones, and wool directly on the canvas. In the animation Life of a Swan, she is even using herself, painting a swan that jumps out of the surface of the painting, coming to life as a human-animal crossover in the “real world”.
Takeshi Murata is producing digital works that is reconfiguring our experience of animation. Murata utilizes everything from intricate hand drawn animations to computer animations and manipulation of defect codes in digital technology to create his works. In Melter 2 he is creating Rorschach inspired areas of colors, forms and movements, which in sum creates a digitally manipulated psychedelia, which is also very much organic and alive.
Adam Shecter is working with hand-drawn animation, drawn directly on a computer tablet instead of on paper. Shecter is maybe the artist in the project which work has most of the elements we think about when we say traditional animation; humor, colors, and action. Shecter is producing one new four to five second animation every morning, and five of these will be on view in Keep on Moving, Don?t Stop.
