My Highlights from Moving Image New York 2015
My Selection:
Ranu Mukherjee, Home and the World, 2015, at Gallery Wendi Norris
The evolution of the notion of home, as site and symbol, shapes the narrative of several intriguing works being featured at Moving Image New York 2015. Ranu Mukherjee’s Home and the World is a hybrid film about hybrid conditions: being real and virtual, rooted and homeless, bound by the past and present, between life and death and nature and artifice. The animated forms of a porch railing fall, dissolving into leaf forms, while shadowy figures emerge and disappear, like ghosts leaving or living in this place. Mukherjee’s film includes elements from Ghare-Baire (1984), a noted Indian film about female independence, further emphasizing transformation—of identity, of relationships, of the built and natural environment—as a central theme.
Hector Zamora, O Abuso da História, 2014, at Luciana Brito Galeria
Known for his often performative explorations of the contemporary urban experience, Hector Zamora’s O Abuso da História takes place in the barren courtyard of a colonial-era house, where potted palm fronds and other houseplants fly through the open windows (at first seemingly on their own; later, figures are seen heaving the plants out), thudding on the stone ground like bodies. As the courtyard is replenished with the leafy greens that once grew from the ground, Zamora’s vision acknowledges the cycles of nature and culture, growth and decay, creation and destruction, in which the central role is humanity’s treatment of our world and each other.
IC-98’s A View from the Other Side / Näkymä vastarannalta is a meticulous hand-drawn HD-animation that brings to life the transformation of a 19th-century public building in Turku, Finland. Seen from the opposing shoreline, a boat passes below the classical, columned structure, invoking the slow, inexorable ravages of years and use. As the lines of the building and its surroundings intertwine and change, the film draws a lyrical, mysterious meditation on time.
Eric Dyer, Copenhagen Cycles Journey, 2015, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
The impact of technology on perception—how what we see changes because of how we see—is the subject of works by artists exploring past and present innovations. Eric Dyer builds contemporary zoetropes, then films these arrangements of tiny, spinning objects, creating dazzling displays of imagery that pay homage to this early form of animation while referencing the exponential onslaught of visual stimulation we experience daily.
Katia Maciel, Desarvorando [Unfolding Trees], 2014, at Zipper Galeria
This is a view of a palmtree-topped landscape seen through a multi-paneled window, which slowly shifts its legibility until the treetops and bushes are reconfigured. The window becomes screens within a screen, moving like puzzle pieces, and enacting the manipulation of virtual and physical perception.