Moving Pictures: Videos by Liliana Porter/Ana Tiscornia and Christian Marclay
Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, Untitled film still from Cuentos Inconclusos / Unfinished Tales, 2022. Digital Video with sound; duration: 10:57 minutes, edition of 5. Image courtesy of Miles Petersen and Hosfelt Gallery.
Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, Untitled film still from Cuentos Inconclusos / Unfinished Tales, 2022. Digital Video with sound; duration: 10:57 minutes, edition of 5. Image courtesy of Miles Petersen and Hosfelt Gallery.
Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, Untitled film still from Cuentos Inconclusos / Unfinished Tales, 2022. Digital Video with sound; duration: 10:57 minutes, edition of 5. Image courtesy of Miles Petersen and Hosfelt Gallery.
Christian Marclay, Untitled film still from Chewing Gum, 2016. Single channel projected animation, silent; duration: 1:34, edition 3/6. Joint acquisition of SBMA, General Acquisition Fund, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, funded by John MacMahon and Michael Zilkha. © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
The two videos brought together in this exhibition differ in length, color palette, story, and sound. They are similar, however, in how their artists made them: the labor- and time-intensive process of stop-motion animation. Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, and Christian Marclay took thousands of still photographic images of their chosen subject matter, then placed these images into a specific sequence in a video-making program.
When these finished sequences are played on a monitor, the human eye and mind perceive these sequential still pictures to be fully moving. The effect is an engaging instance of artistic illusion much like an old-fashioned flipbook but by the use of contemporary technology.
Deceptively simple and far removed from the seamless computer-generated images seen in commercial filmmaking, these two videos (on view for the first time at SBMA) re-orient the viewing experience into one more intimate, complex and even mysterious.
