Amy Lockhart
Faking It
Saturday July 8 –Saturday, August 5, 2006
Opening reception: Friday, July 7 at 7:00 pm
Animation workshop with the artist: Saturday, July 15 at 1:30 pm
Amy Lockhart’s Faking It, a new installation and animation, as well as a mini-retrospective of seven short films, takes the sequential imagination as its primary preoccupation.
Guided by a distinct fascination for the frame-to-frame structure of film making—not to mention the materiality of the medium itself—Lockhart’s installation unearths the mysteries and associative logic of our rigidly linear celluloid journeys, unravels the labyrinthine levels of artifice inherent in the moving picture.
For this exhibition, Lockhart transforms the gallery into a kind of fictional animation studio, complete with story-boards, mock-ups, cut-out props and characters. A life-sized Oxberry camera unit assembled from cardboard adds three-dimensional perspective to the backdrop, an object that upon closer inspection houses a TV monitor behind the lens, displaying the artist’s newest film in a literal inversion of perspective. This animation, starring a pair of extensively-jointed and eerily-hypnotic paper hands performing the process of its own collaged creation, adds a further sense of beguilement to this magical if labour-intensive craft. Meanwhile, the final results of such a process are looped in the screening room, providing a point of reflection on the relationship between practice and product.
The works in this exhibition, at turns fantastic, disturbing and dreamy, depict an unstable psychic landscape that works within the innate sequential conventions of the artist’s chosen media—comic books and cartoons, as well as their nostalgic connotations—only to defy their linear movement and predictability. Faking It points to the inconsequential, the wayward possibilities of narrative, to suggest alternative possibilities for reading, looking and telling stories, a way of finding something real in the seemingly artificial.
Amy Lockhart’s short films and artwork have been exhibited extensively throughout North America, and beyond. She has completed residencies at the Quickdraw Animation Society and California Institute of the Arts, and was awarded an animation fellowship with the National Film Board of Canada. Recently her work was show in Bit by Bit at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and is upcoming in Nog A Dod, an anthology of Canadian psychedelic art published by Conundrum Press.
