Animation

In this piece I am exploring the idea of belonging by tracing the outline of the shifting skyline. Through imagination, learning, and a continuous adjustment, I strive to relate the communal with personal identity.

— Ezra Wube

This title is also availble on Ezra Wube Videoworks: Volume 1

The disparate chronicles of a high school wrestling team, a flooded town of aliens, and the love affair between two young men. Performers responded to individual drawings and prompts to collectively generate improvisational dialog during the Pilot Conference: Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass, in Chicago, 2004.

With Becca Taylor

BE CAREFUL KYLE was produced over a few days shortly before Jacob Ciocci and Kent Lambert discussed their work with Scott Wolniak in a webinar for the University of Chicago's Local Produce series. Jacob sent some clips to Kent, who roughed out a basic structure and added an improvised guitar score. Jacob finished the piece off with some motion graphics and image processing magic. The video owes its tone to the general dread and paranoia of the early pandemic lockdown, and to the consolatory pleasure of first-time collaboration.

In the next chapter of Bobby Abate’s mysterious lo-fi cyborg tale, we find ourselves roaming the set of a 1960’s evening newscast. The mysterious unearthly being has claimed a new test subject and is making use of the station’s control room in attempt to communicate and perhaps reunite with his unshaven counterpart. Zenith is a celestial space, high above the clouds, where lonely frequencies and frantic spirographs pulse the dimension that separates the real from the rendered, the now from nostalgia--and ultimately divides these two beings (alter egos or lovers?)

La Mesa explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire. It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the artist’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The artist casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California. He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush.

Re-Animation 3,4, & 2 are short animations created by looping images of dead insects taken from the artist’s own amateur entomological collections. Each frame of video within a loop is an image of a separate insect in its own distinct contortion. The variety of contortions, coupled with the similarity between insects of the same species, creates the stop motion movement of an individual insect in the final video.

"Here is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they've decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery." 

Prophecies of doom, disaster and political catastrophe envisioned by some of the world’s most famous psychics between the 1960’s and the year 2001 are conjured up through 3D-animation, industrial films, text and historical footage -- the sum of which combine to form a visually stunning meditation on the forces that are driving us into a dark, paranoid and uncertain future. Soothsayer reconsiders yesterday’s daunting and sometimes whimsical predictions for the future after they’ve been outpaced by time. 

The expansive cycles of time vs. the ever smaller circles of life under lockdown. Includes: a journey to the river, some rat facts, more adverts, anagrams, and a noticeable build up of ideas.

Third video in The Variations cycle.

This classical animation explores personal memory, associations and atmosphere.

"I remember from the other room I could hear you violently buttering bread. I secretly hoped that I could be your next victim."

"Barry Doupé's lusty A Boy on a Dock Blowing His Nose features vaguely articulated, quasi-human doodles and Spirographs animated within a bizarre netherworld of its own humid imagination."

--Images Festival, 2005 catalog

If asked to say what this work is about in one word, the answer — which is woven into the electronic musique concrète soundtrack — would be a Joycean one: it’s a “collideorscape.” The imagery is a return to materials Rankus dealt with as a young man in the video Naked Doom (1983). He has recycled imagery such as cages, a toy robot, and brain convolutions; newer motifs include a winged ballerina, Victorian corsets, and alchemical vessels containing birds.