|
Catwalk – Anything That Moves
Rodney LaTourelle
Catwalk, a video installation commissioned
by the Arts Council of Finland for a government research centre,
uses five projectors to illuminate a translucent curtain wall adjacent
to a main-floor entrance. The sixty-minute loop projects the continuous
movement of a variety of living beings. The immense panorama includes
humans of many kinds, small mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians,
insects, fish, and even wheeled machines moving through a non-descript
white or black space.
Fascination is mixed with a slight terror
in the presence of this parade of specimens traversing an absent
habitat while one searches for some motivation or control. Is this
a post-apocalyptic exodus, instinctual retreat, or a loving survey?
Mere DNA? The diverse movements of the characters force comparisons
with textbook diagrams of evolution; but here, there is really only
the possibility of spectral degeneration.
An almost indifferent concatenation of diversity
eschews aesthetic categories for no more than two common yet miraculous
qualities: mere existence and the ability to somehow move from left
to right. A vividness is provided by the fact that many creatures
perambulate at real scale while others are shrunken or magnified
for the frame. In this way, even the more baroque permutations of
characters maintain a balance of intimacy and distance. The curiosity
that arises is not one for intentions but soon accumulates into
the question, “What's next?” Somehow we are faced with
splendour.
Of course, with the serial presentation
of a heterogeneous group performing a single action, it is the uningenious
trope of “same/difference” that is proposed. But how soon
we forget that every living creature is an epiphany and that we
all are caught in a vast system of delicate co-dependence.
Rodney LaTourelle,
an artist and writer based in Winnipeg (Canada) and Berlin, teaches
architecture at the University of Manitoba and writes regularly
for Border Crossings and C Magazine.
|
Atlantis
Now
