Educational animation

Jill Kennedy: New Educational Series
Film Archives, next to ARTSPACE
29 August -30 September, 2009

For this exhibition of three short films that use animated collage, Jill Kennedy has a cleverly ambiguous title. It can refer to the source material where she found her images. Or it could refer to political/historical or social readings from encoded narratives that you might see in the array of moving theatre-like sets and cut-out protagonists.

There is a tension here, between her obvious love for Surrealist collage artists like Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell, and the political readings or messages that can be found in images such as Hussars (Imperial militarist expansionism), microbes and virologists (influenza epidemics), or busy ants and housing subdivisions (community conformity, escalating consumerism).

Yet in some way’s Kennedy’s films follow the lead of the seductively silky, droning music composed by her collaborator John Payne. His sound has more emotional (and visceral) power than her visuals which though entertaining, funny and possibly semantically loaded, don’t bodily penetrate in the way that sound does. Her colour for example, is not saturated but tastefully pastel or slightly faded. You are not optically bombarded by chroma but you are manipulated by horizontal movement as the camera pans past things or objects float past it.

This kinetic sense seems to be Kennedy’s real interest, for she is a sort of suggestive, surrealist abstractionist - despite her interest in narrative. She likes clusters of entangled line and delicate spirograph formations as much as patterned formations of flying fishes, or swaying, nodding canaries. The horizontal movement (punctuated by a little vertical action) seems just as crucial to her as the evocative (or potentially didactic) image – if not more.

The lair of the white worm

Tiffany Rewa Newrick: New work
Essay by Matthew Crookes
The New Zealand Film Archive Nga Kaitiaki O Nga Taonga Whitiahua
Karangahape Rd
11 July - 15 August 2009

We have here an interesting b/w film installation positioned in the NZFA room next door to ARTSPACE: two projections on opposite walls, with cameras aimed down two narrow corridors that are ostensibly linked up to be a continuing long narrow space. It has small roller doors on one side and hinged locker doors on the other.

Standing in the middle and swivelling your head from left to right and back again, you can see that one corridor is slightly shorter and lit at the far end, while the other is longer and dark. Each has brief puddles of light intermittently spaced throughout.

For a lot of the time, nothing happens. While you are twiddling your thumbs, shuffling and getting ready to leave, suddenly with no warning, an amorphous transparent thing appears from nowhere and slowly glides and wobbles its way down the corridor on the left. This soft, air-filled creature is compared by Matthew Crookes in his useful on-site essay to the sinister guard balloon in Patrick MacGoohan’s sixties Sci-Fi TV series The Prisoner. However I think it is less ball-shaped or opaque - and more sausage-like. It is long, squat and membranous.

It reaches the far end, turns off to the right and after briefly disappearing comes back, advances towards you and then carries on on the other screen.

Same thing happens. It retreats to the far end, briefly turns to the right to disappear and then returns. Only this time when it reaches you it disappears. It doesn’t continue on down the other corridor.

The conclusion you reach from all this is that there is a T-shaped set of corridors, not a linked rectangle as some might suppose, which perhaps would be more rational in a building. The screening room is the cross-bar of the T so that no cameras are aimed down the stem. It is from this unseen space that the ‘thing’ appears and to which it returns, before coming back again later.

So what does it all mean, if ‘meaning’ is something other than the experiential? A joke about surveillance perhaps? A rueful comment on white colonial expansionism maybe? Or just a Sci-Fi experiment? Considering there is no sound, this is a highly successful example of mood manipulation. It’s got real atmosphere attained only by visual means. It also plays with the viewer’s sense of logic. Bring a thermos and collapsible stool.