WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: 7 FRAGMENTS FOR GEORGES MELIES MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER sees ANGELES.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: 7 FRAGMENTS FOR GEORGES MELIES

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER

sees ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

DECEMBER 11 2005-FEBRUARY 26 2006

Born in Johannesburg in 1955 William Kentridge became internationally known in the 1990 as a creator of stop-motion animations. His politically savvy films use his native southern Africa as the setting for explorations into politics, race, sex and the changing self. brace fictitious characters inhabit these works as his alter subjects and their images come to life by the agency of the artist's erasing and redrawing with charcoal onward paper.

Rather than near work for a single protection or a series of defences in relation to the drawings, Kentridge created an installation for his fresh work "7 Fragments for Georges Melies." Multiple projections filled the space at the Museum of Contemporary Art in beholds Angeles, each becoming a moving canvas upon the wall. Nine discrete films make up the installation: Journey to the satellite Day for Night, and the seven-part 7 Fragments for Georges Melies (all 2003) French director Georges Melies was a pioneer in the world of science fiction films, transforming the results of vaudeville and shadow projections into cinema. As the writer, director, actor, and filmmaker, Melies had total superintend of his productions. With Melies's film A Trip to the secondary planet (1902) as a point of departure, Kentridge used volumes and objects from his studio as supports in these fantasy films.

Like Melies, Kentridge functions as creative director, actor, writer, and cinematographer in his productions. Furthermore, a background in puppetry helped Kentridge to form connections between drawing, performance, and filmmaking. The films in this installation are his first to combine live action and stop-motion. These works were shooter using both a 16mm camera at twenty-four frames by second as well as a 35mm animation camera at undivided frame per second. These fragments were edited together and transferred to video. Kentridge either adds to or subtracts from a drawing, walks to the camera and films a not many frames, then walks back to the drawing for the nearest step.

The proces of drawing, walking from the drawing to the camera and back, and thinking about that succession of events, led Kentridge to Bruce Nauman's early films where Nauman explored the boundaries of his studio space. The idea of the artist in his studio, the relationship between what is real and what is imagined or drawn, became the make submissive of Melies's films. The 7 Fragments are short bends that depict Kentridge examining things in his studio, drawing, walking, and tossing works into the air. Kentridge plays with forward and backward motion, oftentimes filming himself walking in invert in slow motion, knowing the footage would be quick in emergenciesed backward. A ripped drawing reconstitutes itself, ink prevail upons through the air back into the bottle and works miraculously fly from the floor to Kentridge's hand. These imports become surreal and magical within the connection of the installation. The seven films turn continuously and are not always in sync While there are obvious relationships between them, they are not meant to be viewed the same after the other; rather, they become the raw material for the longer film, Journey to the Moon

In Journey to the satellite Kentridge uses some of the same stays that figured in the shorter films, as well as drawn components He explains, "If the seven earlier fragments are about wandering around the studio waiting for something to happen, Journey to the satellite was an attempt to escape." (1) In the film, drawings within a dictionary house a map as well as the technical diagrams for a rocket ship. Using an espresso chalice as a telescope, Kentridge expects out the window at the skies beyond. He transforms an espresso maker into a rocket that blasts against toward the moon. The lunar landscape, as seen by the and of the studio window, is an animated drawing of Johannesburg. Kentridge performs for the camera, playing the scientist/artist who dreams of worlds afar, actions a muse, but ultimately cannot escape.

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Journey to the satellite is presented opposite another large-scale projection titled Day for Night, which regards Francois Truffaut's film La nuit americaine (1973) as well as the proces of shooting. A fluttering line of white flaws populates a dark foreground. The blubbers cohere, then spread out into what appears to be a celestial firmament In reality, this is a film about ants. Fascinated from the patterns made by ants that invaded his domestic circle Kentridge began to film their moves He was able to sway where they traveled using sugar water, and he recorded their activities in succession film. By presenting the finished work as a negative, he transformed day into night, or rather black into white, creating the illusion of infinite space.

These films explore the magic of cinema at combining live action and animated drawing with simple results Kentridge's whimsical works, made without digital technologies, be of use to as a reminder of what was and what is still possible in the two the drawn and the filmed worlds.