CatharineClarkGallery

Foobel (An Alternative History) (2005)

This animated stop-motion video was made in direct response to social and political arguments over the construction of new sports stadiums, both in the US and UK. Though inspired by the somewhat ill-conceived plan to build a new JETS football arena on the west side of Manhattan, this video refers more directly to the English game of football, creating a brief, absurd history of the evolvement of the stadium from playing surface to ‘Babel-esque’ monstrosity. It is a satire of the need for bigger and bigger stages of any popular type of theatre at the expense of everything else. It conflates the greed and absurdity of the issues with the thrill of the game and the epic religiosity associated with it.

Sun City (2013) focuses attention on the town of Benidorm, Spain.  Out of all the transformations that the package holiday industry has made to the Mediterranean over the past fifty years, Benidorm represents a sea change: from sleepy fishing village to mini-Manhattan.  This extraordinary transformation forms the basis for this work, though the premise behind Benidorm’s growth is dramatically warped.  Sheltered by the mighty Puig Campana Mountain, Benidorm benefits from an extraordinary sun-rich microclimate.  The fantasy described is that the sun, not humankind, is responsible for the growth of the metropolis.  Through photographic reconstruction and collage of past and present imagery, the video suggests that people have been worshiping the sun in Beniform for thousands of years.  Stop motion animation describes the growth of the buildings as if they evolved like plants, grown by the sun itself.  Finally, this living town is transformed into something far more valuable than a tourist destination: a machine for harnessing the sun.  Benidorm is the ultimate solar power station, where energy value trumps that of beauty or pleasure.

Metropolis (2008) is a very abridged narrative history of the city of Charlotte, North Carolina.   The video uses stop motion video animation to physically manipulate aerial still images of the city (both real and fictional), creating a landscape in constant motion.  Starting around 1755, viewers witness the building of the first house in Charlotte along a Native American trading path.  From there, one sees the town develop through the historic dismissal of the English, to the prosperity made by the discovery of gold and the subsequent genesis of the multitude of churches the city is now famous for.  The landscape turns white with cotton, and the modern city is ‘born’, with a more detailed re-creation of the economic boom, and surprising architectural transformation, that has occurred in the past twenty years.

Charlotte is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, primarily due to the influx of the banking community. The result: an unusually rapid architectural and population expansion. This new downtown Metropolis, however, is therefore subject to the whim of the market and the interest of the giant corporations that choose to do business there.  Made entirely from images printed on paper, the animation represents a sped-up urban planner’s dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today.  Ultimately the video continues the city’s development into an imagined hubristic future, with more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas—and bleak environmental decay.  It is an extreme representation of the already serious water shortages that face many expanding American cities today.  Though a warning, the work is as much as a statement of our paper thin significance.  No matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build, humans have limited gravity compared to the powers of nature.