Reanimator
CURATED BY ELIZAVETA SHNEYDERMAN AND ANTHONY DISCENZA
AUGUST 16 - NOVEMBER 9, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION AUGUST 16TH, 6-8 PM
statement -
Reanimator explores the way plasticity is modeled and visualized within various systems of representation, with a particular focus on the plastic body in animation. The exhibition also considers the ways in which the many technological systems that have developed around the representation of plasticity over the past century—predominantly emerging from the fields of cinema and animation—have, in turn, influenced visual and cultural aesthetics in other areas of cultural production. The exhibition constitutes a map of sorts of this influence, revealing the complex negotiations around what gets crystallized into an image and what kind of subjects are produced by the process.
Hybridizing museological display strategies with the vernacular of an in-situ production environment, the exhibition will present materials drawn from a wide range of related disciplines, including sculpture, experimental film and video, and the cinema and gaming industries. The exhibition will stage productive dialogues between these different arenas of output—locating the uncanny echoes emerging from tropes and patterns of production that have become hard-wired into the visual regime of animation over time, and considering how these have informed conceptions of the fluid, speculative body.
Interwoven among a collection of artworks from a range of contemporary artists will be artifacts extracted from various systems of animation, including animatronics, YouTube clips, render files, and more. These non-art objects, drawn from the interstitial spaces of different production methodologies, map the often-unseen connections between technologic determinism and visual aesthetics. Collectively, the contents of the exhibition model the impossible correspondence between our subjective imagination of ourselves and our objective imaginings.
ABOUT THE CURATORS -
Elizaveta Shneyderman is a Belarusian-American curator, researcher and publisher. She is Curator at the Riga Technoculture Research Unit (RTRU) and Curator-at-Large at Kim? Contemporary Art Center (Riga, Latvia). Shneyderman’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the history and philosophy of media materialities and the techniques that emerge from them, including their influence on contemporary visual culture. Her essays on contemporary art and visual culture have been published in Artforum, Animation Studies Journal, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, PIN-UP Magazine, and Rhizome, among others. Shneyderman has previously held curatorial positions and contributed research to exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, EMPAC, PARTICIPANT INC, Hunter East Harlem Gallery Kunsthalle.Ost, and Mana Contemporary. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College and is currently Adjunct Professor of Art History at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a psychoanalyst in formation at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics.
Anthony Discenza is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in western Massachusetts. In addition to his own practice, he also runs the residency/project space lower_cavity