2025-03-08 20:00:00
Already more cumbersome than digital techniques, stop-motion animation typically involves sets and characters designed to make subtle movements so that filmmakers can capture minute shifts frame by frame. Directors Jack Cunningham and Nicolas Ménard, of Eeastend Western, have chosen the even more involved process of replacement animation for their recent project.
Popularized by George Pal in the 1930s and ’40s, replacement animation involves creating distinctive models for each movement. Where Pal used wooden characters, though, Cunningham and Ménard opted for 3D-printed figures for their new anthology, TRIPLE BILL.
Comprising a trio of films all under two minutes, the collection spans “three genres to survey the atmospheric potential of the technique,” the directors say. The first is “BLUE GOOSE,” a western mocking the current state of social media, that features an enormous cowboy statue that leaves his post at the gas station. Just to have the figure walk across the set required eight unique models.
The second two are similarly labor-intensive. “CLUB ROW” is a dizzying film noir about data privacy featuring an endlessly spinning staircase, and “MYTHACRYLATE” is a fantastic glimpse at the battles we have with ourselves.
As the behind-the-scenes photos below show, each model had to be cut, sanded, and painted individually before being precisely placed in position. Ménard told It’s Nice That that elements like lighting, sound, and camera angles were particularly important to help convey emotion in TRIPLE BILL, which envelops viewers in a hypnotic critique of technology and its effects.
Find more from Eastend Western on Vimeo. For a similar technique, you also might enjoy these bears on stairs.
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2025-03-08 03:19:45
Katherine Duclos begins each artwork with a color palette and no plan. Placing modular LEGO bricks one by one, the Vancouver-based artist intuitively builds each dense composition, commencing a repetitive process in which she introduces paint before rearranging again.
Duclos’ most recent solo show, aptly titled The light and color we carry, reinforces the overarching significance of color within the artist’s practice. She created her recent collection during a great shift as she moved to a new home with her family. The neurodivergent artist held onto color as a grounding force, creating connections between the specific hues and lights she would miss in her previous home.
A statement from the Vancouver Art Gallery reads:
Times of transition and upheaval are particularly difficult for autistic families, and Katherine’s need to order her world became more intense as her home became more chaotic and the future seemed unclear. To better prepare herself for the changes, she focused on regulatory work that enabled her to feel a sense of control and order amidst the chaos.
Having disabilities with spatial processing and rotating images causes Duclos to run into some obstacles with the diagrams and instructions that accompany the traditional LEGO kit. “I never enjoyed Lego until my son handed me four flat pieces stuck together when he was 5 and said, ‘I thought you’d like these colors next to each other.’ That was my light bulb moment,” she says. Made to hang at any orientation, each vibrant amalgamation encourages movement and fluctuation despite the stiff, blocky nature of the material.
Duclos is creating work in preparation for a forthcoming solo exhibition in January next year. Keep tabs on her work via Instagram and the artist’s website.
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2025-03-08 00:21:42
Now based in London, David Surman was raised in a small coastal village in southwest England. The bucolic scenery and access to animals left an indelible impact on the artist, who plumbs his memory and draws on a vast array of art historical references in his paintings.
Surman’s most recent body of work is on view in his solo exhibition at Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. In comparison to previous collections, After the Flood is less abstract but similarly gestural, as sweeping brushstrokes delineate a bull’s sinewed musculature or the curled mane of a bashful horse.
Interested in the ways we project our experiences and ideologies onto the natural world, Surman renders recognizable subjects in a manner that reflects our tendency to ascribe human emotion and feeling to other species. “I like painting animals because they short-circuit people’s interpretive routines and get them looking at paint without the self-consciousness they might bring to abstract painting,” he said in a 2023 interview, adding:
The creatures that I paint are caught up in our human problem, which is the separation from the world caused by consciousness. The way in which my animals look at the viewer deliberately sets up a feeling of intensity, perhaps troubled engagement, a kind of accusation or affection. But in every case, the creature possesses a trace or residue of conscious agency.
In “Old Stew Head,” for example, viewers encounter a deeply troubled fox grasping a limp fish in its jaws. The dog in “Bathers At K’gari” is similarly anxious as it carries a young pup under a bright blue sky.
After the Flood continues in London through March 29. Find more from the artist on his website and Instagram.
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2025-03-07 06:26:02
On the site of the former Scott’s Grove Baptist Church, artist Tony M. Bingham has constructed a monumental work of contemplation and reflection. Two wood-paneled walls stand parallel in the serene clearing with stained glass windows, a Sylacauga marble floor, and a steel cutout depicting members who once worshiped on its grounds.
A tribute to local history, Bingham’s work is titled “The Praise House,” which takes its name from the vernacular structures people who were enslaved often built on plantations throughout the Southern U.S. as a space for prayer. “My way of addressing the power and the legacy is to just begin to look at some of the possible sources of opposition that the enslaved community could have participated in,” the artist says.
A new short documentary follows Bingham as he visits The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation and installs the work. Located just outside of Birmingham in Harpersville, Alabama, the former plantation house is now a space for healing and reconciliation run by descendants of both the enslaved and enslavers.
Today, the center hosts a variety of art and culture programming to reflect on its history, and “The Praise House” is one such commission. After learning more about the enslaved communities, Bingham wanted to create a work that honored their legacy. “Using organic, repurposed, and cast-off materials, I make art that tells the story of my cast-off people,” he says, adding:
The house was being historically renovated, and planks of lumber were being replaced. I imagined that these old boards were the very surfaces enslaved people walked on or touched, and I sought to bring those materials back together in a way that could inspire reflection on the history of the enslaved people who once lived there.
Directed by Tyler Jones of 1504, the film is a poignant, enlightening glimpse into the lengthy process behind “The Praise House.” Bingham, who is a professor at Miles College in Birmingham, frequently invokes the historical realities of the location and returns to fundamental questions about the purpose of his work and art more broadly. “Who will speak for my people if not the artist?” he asks. “Who will help those outside of the art dialogue to understand the creative potential they possess?”
Watch “The Praise House” above, and find more from the artist on Instagram.
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2025-03-06 22:10:02
“Abstraction is not a…simplified way of thinking: it’s a leap—a leap into a dimension that cannot otherwise be understood,” says Haegue Yang, whose multimedia installations and sculptures explore a wide array of material associations, immersing the senses. Series such as Light Sculptures and Sonic Sculptures defy genres, often combining ready-made, mass-produced items with industrially created substances.
At the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Yang’s solo exhibition Lost Lands and Sunken Fields engages viewers in a “dialectic of contrasts: light and dark, aerial and grounded, buoyant and heavy, spare and dense, interior and exterior,” a statement says. The show follows the artist’s first major survey in the U.K. at London’s Hayward Gallery, which embarked on a collage-forward celebration of work created during the past 20 years.
Working between Seoul and Berlin, Yang hybridizes folk customs and craftsmanship, everyday items, and vernacular techniques in pieces that combine sculpture, installation, collage, text, video, wallpaper, and sound. “Sonic Intermediates – Triad Walker Trinity,” for example, coats steel frames in tiny bells, metal rings, plastic twine, and more, which evoke vaguely animalistic forms that move around on casters.
Time and geography collapse in an abstracted visual language that merges the modern and the pre-modern, art history and literature, and themes of displacement, migration, forced exile, and global diasporas. Her works “link various geopolitical contexts and histories in an attempt to understand and comment on our own time,” says a statement from kurimanzutto, which represents the artist.
The gallery also presents a concurrent exhibition titled Arcane Abstractions, including two-dimensional collage works complemented by an archival display of pieces by Mexican artisans. Yang continues to investigate cultural heritage and ritualistic symbolism through materials as she forwards “a proposal to live our lives today with a holistic view of mobility and technology, respect for spirituality, as well as contemplation on the resilient adaptability of both nature and humans,” says a statement.
Arcane Abstractions continues through April 5 in Mexico City, and Lost Lands and Sunken Fields runs through April 27 in Dallas.
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2025-03-06 06:43:54
In the Jordanian desert, Syrian families displaced by war huddle atop stacks of boxes like stalwart islands in a dry and unforgiving landscape. Photographer Nick Brandt captures children, siblings, and entire families who stand together and climb skyward like monuments or promontories—what the artist describes as “pedestals for those that in our society are typically unseen and unheard.”
The series marks the fourth chapter in an ongoing series called The Day May Break, which has taken Brandt around the world in search of visual stories illuminating the effects of the climate crisis.
Brandt began the series in 2020, reflecting on myriad experiences of “limbo,” both in the midst of the pandemic and relating to the tenuous ecological balance of our planet. In an essay accompanying Chapter One of The Day May Break, Brandt writes:
Nearly twenty years ago, I started photographing the wild animals of Africa as an elegy to a disappearing world. After some (too many) years seeing the escalating environmental destruction, I felt an urgent need to move away from that kind of work and address the destruction in a much more direct way.
Brandt began the series in Zimbabwe and Kenya, focusing the first chapter on portrayals of both people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction. Every person he documented was deeply affected by the changing climate. “Some were displaced by cyclones that destroyed their homes,” Brandt says. “For some, like Kuda in Zimbabwe, or Robert and Nyaguthii in Kenya, it was more tragic: both of them lost two young children, swept away by the floods.”
For Chapter Two, Brandt traveled to the Senda Verde Animal Sanctuary in Bolivia, where wildlife affected by trafficking and habitat destruction are cared for. And for Chapter Three, subtitled SINK/RISE, he took his camera into the ocean off the coast of Fiji, focusing on individuals whose livelihoods have been impacted by rising sea levels. Plunging decrepit furniture onto the sea floor, individuals and families interact with one another entirely underwater.
For the series’ newest addition, Chapter Four, subtitled The Echo of Our Voices, Brandt traveled to arid Jordan, one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. The dramatic black-and-white photos feature refugee families who fled the war in Syria. Perched on stacks of cubes, they transform into living monoliths, symbolic of resilience, surrounded by the rugged, sandy expanse.
The photographer says, “Living lives of continuous displacement largely due to climate change, they are forced to move their homes up to several times a year, moving to where there is available agricultural work—to wherever there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow.” Parents stand alongside their children; siblings embrace; and families are shown alternately gazing into the distance, turning to one another for comfort, or taking time to rest.
“This chapter is different from the first three chapters, both visually and emotionally: a show of connection and strength in the face of adversity; that when all else is lost, you still have each other,” Brandt says. Explore much more work on his website.
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