The Bear Cycle

• Press Release (PDF)
• Animation Promo Card (300dpi RGB JPG)

A Hand Drawn Animation By Simon O’Carrigan

Simon O’Carrigan’s latest animation is an odd little thing.  Continuing his investigation into the use of the ‘loop’ when displaying video art, he seems to have found a strong form.  Rather than working with linear, narrative video (marred by a jarring loop each time the video finishes), Simon builds the action of the loop into the form of the piece.

Showing in the night window projection screen at Seventh Gallery is a bear riding a bicycle, attached by a strange contraption to a pedestal on which a matador stands.  The bear chases the matador’s flag, the matador is consistently spun away from the bear — it’s a ‘Catch 22’ that makes us ask, what kind of animations would Samuel Beckett have made?

The actual animation runs for around six seconds, but it is looped indefinitely — and so seamlessly (since the characters, themselves, are stuck in a loop) — that its real duration really depends on the audiences fascination with the movement and the setup.  What is really going on here is the tension between two characters, forming a kind of ‘perpetual motion machine’.

O’Carrigan has played with looped animations before.  Most notably, earlier in 2009 he was awarded the Centre for Contemporary Photography’s ‘Most Innovative Use of Photomedia’ prize, for a work called ‘Polar Rooftops’ (which featured a similar, although rendered in less detail, bear on a bicycle).  Most recently he exhibited a work called ‘Terminal’ at Platform Artist Run Space, depicting a fairly depressing day in the life of a commuting worker, with a major sleep disorder. 

In The Bear Cycle, though, he has really made strong use of the integral loop, and his strange, arbitrary conjunctions of character and setting are compelling.

Details:

Exhibition opens Tuesday 24th November, 2009, 6pm–8pm.
Exhibition closes Saturday 12th December, 2009.
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12-6pm, Night Screen 6pm-12am.
Address: 155 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne.

For further information:

Contact Simon on 0403 885 988.

Further Links:

http://www.seventhgallery.org/

http://seventhgallery.blogspot.com/

Terminal

A hand-drawn animation showing at Platform Artist Run Space

Download press release.

The latest work by Simon O’Carrigan again displays his love of rough, hand-drawn animation, contrasting starkly to the computer-produced animation we are so used to.  Terminal carefully considers the typical looped display of video art, and makes the loop an integral part of the work.

Showing at Platform gallery is an unassuming little animation depicting a looped day in the life of an everyman office worker.  Transforming the idea of Groundhog Day into Kafkaesque heights of absurdity, the protagonist seems trapped by some form of sleep disorder, unable to escape the grind of the commute and his time in the office.  The gallery space, in Campbell Arcade beneath Flinders Street station, is an ideal location for this work, as it is sure to strike a chord with many commuters as they pass by in peak hour.

At first glance, the work seems to be a very short (two minutes) loop, however if one lingers longer they will notice that as the days flow by for the protagonist, he seems to fade from existence.  It leaves you wondering, how will this Sisyphus manage to complete that ever-replenishing towering pile of paperwork?  As you watch the character fade away, you wonder if he has suffered as many paper cuts as the animator must have, to draw by hand the hundreds of individual frames that comprise the animation.

Exhibition Details

Platform Artists Group Inc. (‘Frame Space’)
Campbell Arcade, Degraves Street Subway, Melbourne.
Exhibition Opening Night: Friday 4th September 2009, from 6pm.
Exhibition Dates: Monday 31st August—Friday 25th September 2009.

Screening Details

Terminal has also screened at the famous giant public screen in Federation Square, Melbourne, in Program 1 of the AUSthetic compilation series. Screenings were repeated at various times in June 2010.

The Petrol Can Rider, 2009. Click thumbnails above to view stills. Video will appear online once its festival round is complete.

The Petrol Can Rider has screened (or is confirmed to screen in):

• Electric Shorts (Melbourne Fringe Festival) 2009
• The Canberra Short Film Festival 2009
• The Melbourne International Animation Festival 2010
• Australian International Animation Festival 2010
• St Kilda Film Festival 2010 – Top 100 Australian Short Films
• Revelation Film Festival 2010, Perth
• Melbourne Underground Film Festival 2010

The Petrol Can Rider was launched at Bus Gallery, looped on exhibition, in June/July 2009. Download the flyer/invite for details.
Downloads: Film Promo Card (A7 PDF) | Official Bus Gallery Invite (DL PDF)

THE PETROL CAN RIDER (Catalogue essay from launch exhibition, by Martyn Pedler)

As I write this, I'm hanging improbably in the air. The map that appears when I press a button on the armrest says I'm almost exactly halfway between Australia and my destination on the other side of the world. Looking closer – the map is unreassuringly staticky – I see that the familiar outline of home has disappeared altogether from the margins of the map.

Australia has always been defined in part by its unlikely geography. It's not nicknamed "Down Under" for nothing. The isolation of living at the ends of the earth has also given us a strange, ongoing relationship with the end of the world.

George Miller's Mad Max, for example, knew it would barely have to disguise the countryside to imply some kind of apocalypse. Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin's cult heroine from the late-80s, Tank Girl, married a British punk sensibility with an Australian setting, mutated kangaroos and all. The Matrix starred a human population fooled into thinking the world hadn't ended, but like Keanu Reeves' Neo, we knew better – and locals knew the simulations was disguised Sydney streets, too. Worst of all, DC Comics basically blew Australia off the map in its series Invasion!, presumably thinking the rest of the world wouldn't notice.

Which brings me, finally, to Simon O'Carrigan's The Petrol Can Rider. This animation continues the tradition of imagining our staggering steps towards the end. His trenchcoated hero needs fuel for his car; that's the only thing we know about him, or that we need to know. Without fuel, the story will be over. His desperation creates its own physics. Eventually, the empty petrol can he clutches itself begins to float, becoming a hopeful vehicle to carry him away.

O'Carrigan's piece borrows its story from Franz Kafka's short story The Coal Scuttle Rider. For many, Kafka has become shorthand for grinding, surreal bureaucracy. Does it seem strange, then, for this animation to use the kind of cartoonish logic in which the shockwaves from a dog's bark can knock a man to the ground? People forget that Kafka is funny. It's not so much black comedy as it is a slapstick of the soul. He'd be tickled, I think, with the O'Carrigan's Looney Toons touches.

The script for The Petrol Can Rider includes the following line: "To remain still in this world is to be condemned to death". This is true of any animation, of course. Some technologies of animation boast about the massive processing power and rendering times required to make their subjects move. Those giant transforming robots you last saw on the big screen? Press releases excitedly revealed that each frame required over thirty hours to process.

O'Carrigan's apocalypse, however, is painstakingly hand-painted and cranked into motion at only 12 frames a second. Any faster than this and we'd risk missing the point. When fuel is so scarce and energy so precious, movement must be precisely calculated. Why would the back half of a dog move just because the front half does in a world collapsing into entropy? Equally, why would we see more of this world than we need to? Whatever's outside this vignette doesn't matter; it certainly doesn't matter to the driver, the merchant, and the dog that populate it.

Now, I'm watching the screen in the back of the seat in front of me and its cartoon plane stutter across the simulated map of the Pacific. I imagine that if we ran out of fuel, right now, up at 33,000 feet, we wouldn't fall. We'd hang here, landlocked in the sky like in Looney Toons, until physics finally noticed and animated our descent.

Martyn Pedler
22nd June, 2009
Halfway to New York
www.martynpedler.com

Knife, 2009. Click thumbnails above to view stills. Click here to view video.

Knife has been screened on Rage (2009), and featured in the Melbourne Internation Animation Festival (2009), as well as various online venues.

Be Famous & Die. First shown as part of Melbourne and Other Myths at the City Museum @ Old Treasury, Melbourne, 2008. Based on an original monologue by Martyn Pedler, with sound design by Michael Prior. In 2008 this animation has featured in the Brisbane International Animation Festival 2008, the Canberra Short Film Festival 2008, Electrofringe @ This Is Not Art (Newcastle) 2008, The Substation, Singpaore, 2009, and Melbourne International Animation Festival 2009.

Animations from The Drowned World, exhibited as a projection based installation at Shifted Galllery, Richmond, 2008.

Various short experimental animations, 2004—2007.

The works on this page were part of 'Persistence of Vision', 2010. To see the other works in the project, navigate the menu to "Other / Exhibitions > Persistence of Vision".

The above works were created in study for, and some exhibited in, “The Drowned World” at Shifted Gallery, Richmond, Victoria, 2008. The below will view in a separate slide set. It is a propositional work for a possible series.

With the exception of the palette work, the works on this page were part of 'Persistence of Vision', 2010. To see the other works in the project, navigate the menu to "Other / Exhibitions > Persistence of Vision".

These works were exhibited as a series in Somnambulist at Victoria Park Gallery in September 2008.

The Found Sculpture Series, 2007.

The first two videos are tests for composition and the possible relationships between painting and video. The final, Data Dérive, applies the Situationist exploration of space to the fictional space of the internet.

Persistence of Vision

In 2010, Simon received two grants to develop & exhibit a new body of work, returning to his painting and collage practice after working in animation for two years. The project is being developed in two parts. The first, funded by a grant from the City of Yarra, was exhibited at c3 Contemporary Artspace — images and details can be seen below. The second, funded by the City of Melbourne, will be exhibited at Blindside in late 2010 — check the info > forthcoming page for details.

Persistence of Vision – Part One

Artist uses animation techniques to render human movement “in-animate”.

Visual artist Simon O’Carrigan presents an exhibition of works on paper and canvas at c3 contemporary art space in July-August. O’Carrigan studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts, and Monash University, before becoming a self-taught animator. His latest films have screened widely at film festivals including the Top 100 Australian Shorts program of the 2010 St Kilda Film Festival.

He now returns to works on paper and canvas, and is using the skills gained as an animator to deconstruct human movement.
Persistence of Vision – Part One is a series of works on paper and canvas, examining human movement through the eye of an animator, where movement is broken down into still frames, and overlaid. The effect is frieze-like – recalling ancient Egyptian art, Futurism, but viewed through a contemporary, video-aware artists‘ eye.

The term Persistence of Vision is common in film and animation theory. It describes the phenomena that the human eye, though seeing a series of still frames flashing for a fraction of a second, interprets movement. Movement of this kind is trickery! Indeed, the imagery in this exhibition depicts people attempting sporting tricks – skateboarding, basketball shots. O’Carrigan collates these frames, that would otherwise form an animation, onto one layer of imagery. He sidesteps the trickery, defeats it – little wonder that his skaters fail their tricks, and basketballers miss their shots.

Exhibition Details:

Persistence of Vision – Part One
21st July – 8th August, 2010.
Opening Night Wednesday 21st July 2010, 6-8pm.
c3 contemporary art space
The Abbotsford Convent
1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford VIC 3067
Gallery hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 10am - 5pm.
Supported by a City of Yarra Community Arts Grant.

Related Links:

Downloads

Invitation (JPG, 618kb)

Download press release (PDF, 584kb)

Download press quality image pack (ZIP, 2.7mb)

Installation views of The Drowned World at Shifted Gallery, Richmond, 2008. Animation samples can be found under the animation category.

Installation views of Elisions, an exhibition at Runt Gallery, Monash University, Caulfield, 2007. Many of the works featured video and animation projected onto canvas or paper. The animations can be viewed in the animation section of the site.

Elision (noun):

• The omission of a sound or syllable when speaking (as in I'm, let's, e'en).
• An omission of a passage in a book, speech, or film.
• The process of joining together or merging things, esp. abstract ideas.
• From the Latin elidere, to 'crush out'.