Window Summer Show
Gregory Bennett, Phillipa Makgill & Susie Pratt >

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The primary featured ‘performer’ is a generic 3D male model to which a skeleton has been applied to enable movement. Utilizing a limited set of action cycles, the figure is rendered in low resolution exposing its digital ‘skin’ as often incomplete and fractured when in movement. The model’s surface colour has been reduced to a basic white. Likewise the environment where the animation is staged has been reduced to a basic black, eschewing the high resolution gloss of traditional 3D animation.

Drawing on, among other things, Muybridge’s early photographic experiments in capturing movement, pre-cinema optical toys such as the phenakistoscope and the precision cinematic dance spectacles of Busby Berkley, Incorporations presents the spectacle of a narrative which is constantly doing and undoing itself. The figure is submitted to the movement-apparatus of animation (what Jean-Louis Comolli calls a ‘machine of the visible’) and is active and moving, but is not necessarily ‘alive’.

This figure can be seen as a shell, an automaton subject to repetition and replication in an obsessional performance of loops, cycles and gestures in a display which binds the audience in the spectacle of the animate. It is a figure whose presence is often unstable, but also insistent and self-perpetuating through the stubborn drive of movement and transformation and incorporation.

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Gregory Bennett is a filmmaker and video artist with a special interest in animation and animation theory. He produced both short films and video installations which have been shown both in New Zealand and internationally. He has recently completed an MFA at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland and teaches film and media production at both Auckland University and AUT.

Susie Pratt is an artist and writer who works with installation, sculpture, video and animation. She has recently completed a BFA at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland with a major in Sculpture. She is editor and co-founder of Crease, a critical magazine associated with Elam.

Phillipa Makgill's installations and ephemeral sculptures blur the lines between painting practice and sculpture. She has recently completed a BFA at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland with a major in Painting and Sculpture.