Rewind: Allison Hrabluik
Mercer Union, Toronto
We all harbour strange ideas about places we've never been. Cutting through the myths, Allison Hrabluik, rather than simply depicting the odd and faraway places she has been, intimately conveys her experience of them, and she goes to great lengths to do it. Her exhibition "Island, Bar, and Abattoir" consists of three stop-motion animation videos and a number of the little cardboard sets in which they were shot, each inspired by places Hrabluik has seen and been. Lofoten Islands, Norway captures the stark reality of living in a remote northern locale, Niagara Street, Toronto demystifies the daily routine of meat-processing-plant employees and The Pit Bar, Dawson City dispels the notion that nothing happens in this town beyond gold-rush tourism. The Pit Bar, the most spectacular of the three, fabricates a show by the Canadian indie-rock band the Constantines in the Dawson City bar months before they ever played there.
Amazingly, Hrabluik teases her work's fascinating look and atypically choppy movement out of video, albeit in several stages. After shooting on video the people who appear in the piece, she builds miniature sets of her chosen locations. She then photographs frames from the video as it plays on a monitor screen and holds "cutting parties," for which friends come and help cut individual characters out of the hundreds of photographs (more than a thousand for The Pit Bar, Dawson City).
Placing them in the sets, frame after frame, Hrabluik painstakingly animates the people in her original video by replicating their movement with the cut-outs, then commits them back onto video. The range of movement in The Pit Bar, Dawson City is staggering. It begins with the Constantines tuning up and people milling around the bar. The sounds are there, nicked from the original filming of the band and some friends in Hrabluik's studio, but it's the erratic motion of the characters that really captures one's attention. Hrabluik animated them all individually according to the nature of their movement rather than the conventional demands of smooth stop-motion continuity.
It's precisely here that the work transcends typical animation and shows its aesthetic accomplishment. Rather than recreating our immediate perception of motion, the work points to inner experience and the impressions that little moments leave on us. Budget filmmakers often point to the cold and flat results of video; super-8 film, in contrast, flickers by like memories themselves. Here Hrabluik achieves the same effect with video, dispelling yet another myth in the process.
Spring 2005
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