Curators

JORDAN BASEMAN

GARY THOMAS

Artists

KIT WISE

YU ARAKI

DAVID THEOBALD

TADASU TAKAMINE

CHRIS SHEPHERD

LOIS ROWE

EMILY RICHARDSON

DAVID O’REILLY

NATHANIEL MELLORS

JAMES LOWNE

INGER LISE HANSEN

KATIE GOODWIN

GERAINT EVANS

JORDAN BASEMAN

Date: 09-Feb-2013 – 10-Mar-2013

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

971 horses + 4 zebras celebrates the unpredictable processes of experiments with animation, with a focus on how animation as a labour intensive process and form is being applied in the creation of conceptual artworks. The title is taken from a work by Yu Araki in which an image of horses, appropriated from the internet, reference the pre-cinema animation of Eadweard Muybridge.

The exhibition includes work by artists from the UK, Japan, Ireland, Australia and the USA, and is curated by Jordan Baseman and Animate’s Associate Director, Gary Thomas. From November 2012 it will tour to WIMBLEDON Space, London, UK; CAST, Tasmania; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia; and The British School at Rome, Italy.

CURATORS’ STATEMENT:
971 horses + 4 zebras is an exhibition of artists’ films that employ animation techniques as part of contemporary practice. With a wide variety of approach and style, what connects these works is their experimental application of basic animation techniques, and, sometimes, a refraction of the skills and materials of animation in relation to the digital.

The artists featured in 971 horses + 4 zebras appropriate the fundamental techniques of the earliest cinema: stop-frame, time-lapse, in-camera editing, multiple exposure – to foreground process and the construction of image and movement. Animation is used by these artists to ponder upon: (the collapse and expansion of) time; (cinematic, imagined and actual) space; (invented, documented and archived) depictions of landscape and (the manipulation and construction of) narrative.

The works selected for this exhibition will come together to create an installed programme of films that operate as autonomous artworks and collectively as a composite whole: celebrating the unpredictable processes of experimental animation. This collection of artist’s films will focus on the physical nature of experimental animation as a practice from which to create contemporary conceptual artworks. The works will be installed and screened in a dynamic fashion within the gallery space.