Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :)))))) (video still), 2017. Courtesy the artists.

Other Life-formings

Parastoo Anoushahpour, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Laurie Kang,
Alex McLeod, Pedro Neves Marques, Linda Sanchez, Amanda Strong
January 13-March 7, 2020
Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga
Curated by Alison Cooley

Opening Reception & Performance with Daniel Barrow
Wednesday, January 15, 5-8:30pm
Performance begins at 7pm

Other Life-formings

One of the greatest capacities of the medium of animation is its magic—the apparent bringing-to-life of a world of static objects, uncertain companions, and unruly agencies. Things move, they do, they feel the propulsion of awakened urgencies. This “magic,” in fact a technology of representation which cascades still images in order to undo the perceived stillness of the image, also illuminates a fundamental relationship between people and things. Animation activates non-human agency as observed by a spectator, a participant, a co-performer recognizing the coming-to-life of an object, an animal, a photographic or digital entity. It opens space for the sentience and sign-making capacities of other-than-human beings, invites non-human languages, unsettles anthropocentric logics. It “models the possibility of possibility.”¹ In visualizing the liveliness of the non-human, animation complicates relationships with nature, technology, and the notion of time (still moments unfrozen, progress undone).

Animation, it turns out, opens opportunities to ask questions about the constituent elements of life: who or what gets coded as living? By what schema do we grant liveliness, agency, animacy to non-humans? Through whose technologies do we come to see life, and to identify with it? By what means might we refuse or refute ethnographic fascinations with animism, instead attuning ourselves to expanded frameworks for liveliness? Other Life-formings interrogates the conditions of coming-to-life along four lines of inquiry: capacities for movement, language forming, and empathy. Across stop-motion animation, digital modelling, photo-sensitive interspecies collaboration, kinetic sculpture, and video installation, the exhibition tracks the precarious empathies enlivened by animation.

For more information on the exhibition and artists, see the Blackwood Gallery website.

1. Esther Leslie, “Animation and History” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 25-35.

Daniel Barrow, Vanitas, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

Opening Reception & Performance with Daniel Barrow
Wednesday, January 15, 5-8:30pm
Performance begins at 7pm
Blackwood Gallery

Over the last fifteen years, Daniel Barrow has used obsolete technologies to present queer pictorial narratives by merging the methods and cultural histories of cinema, comic books, animation, shadow puppetry, and magic lantern shows. He is best known for creating and adapting comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on an overhead projector. In this performance and talk, Barrow discusses his practice and performs excerpts from a series of works-in-progress including The Reading Wand (about an imaginary object of reading and translation technology with an animatronic head), The Collector (the story of a puritanical teenage queer who fetishizes the kind of famous portraits with eyes that follow the viewer from one end of a gallery to the other), and The Lady Derringer (an experimental short named after the miniature gun designed to fit neatly into a woman’s pocketbook).

A FREE shuttle bus to Blackwood Gallery will depart from Mercer Union (1286 Bloor St W, Toronto) at 5:30pm and return to Mercer Union for 8:30pm.

Acknowledgments

The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga. We would also like to acknowledge the support of University of Toronto affinity partners Manulife, MBNA, and TD Insurance.

Blackwood Gallery
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6

www.blackwoodgallery.ca
blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca
905.828.3789
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The Blackwood Gallery promotes LGBTQ2 positive spaces and experiences and is free of physical barriers. The gallery is FREE and open to the public.