Forum expanded Talk and Show:
Episode 6: The Space Between Seeing and Knowing is Haunted
12.02. 10:00 Arsenal 1 (admission free)
Cartoon is an animated adaptation of a car commercial and is a companion piece to The Quick and the Dead another animation based on footage of two soldiers in Iraq. Together they provide two very different takes on the current political situation. These works are shown with their component animation drawings to reveal time telescoped into the 400 or so parts that constitute the manufacture of a cinematic minute. It seems to me of interest to unpack the meanings of what has become the apex of popular visual culture.
Doina Popescu and Stephen Andrews in conversation (Toronto 2009):
Your work creates a rich and subtle dialogue between your own very layered and carefully constructed artistic processes on the one hand and the emotionally charged patterns of image production in much of current public media on the other.
Since everything today is mediated I use appropriated source material culled from different sources. What I try to do is represent the means by which we receive information as well as the imagery itself and its meanings. Both the form and the materials used are important and speak to the content of the imagery. I started using the dot matrix in 2002 when I found very little reporting in the print media of the political situation. It was a way to represent this lack. Internet searches of soldiers blogs and alternative information sites supplied me with material to work from. In some ways I think of this as a kind of curatorial project, making sense of the millions of images and videos available on line by selecting, ordering and re-editing. This source material was then rendered as drawings using a homemade colour separation technique using window screening and crayons that imitated the look of newspaper photographs.
Canada 2007, DVD-Loop, 45 seconds
The Quick and the Dead, Kanada 2003, DVD-Loop, 1 minute 14 seconds, Loopanimation, Drawings
Stephen Andrews was born 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario. He lives and works in Toronto.
Cartoon was curated by Doina Popescu, Ryerson Photography Gallery and Research Centre, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
