JIM OVELMEN
Facsimiles of Animation Practice into Contemporary Art:
Fractured Expectations and Sidetrippin'

PART 3

JOSHUA MOSLEY

He is an American artist living and working Philadelphia. He creates drawings, sculpture, and computerized-stop motion animation (I will try to explain his process later). Here, I will focus on just one of his works: His short animated film DREAD which was included in the 52nd Venice Biennale. He is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania. (his website here)

Mosley uses stop-motion and computers to explore communication and the ways in which technology complicates it.

His film DREAD has been called “a morality play in which the worlds of thought, imagination, and the subconscious are conjured, and easy conclusions are forestalled” Dread is the name of the dog. There is a clear narrative:
French Philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal meet in the in the forest. In their encounter, they are not able to resolve the “nature” of things. The negotiation remains unresolved. Animals/insects may resemble alter egos of the human figures. The argument itself between Pascal and Rousseau can be represented by a giant beetle, a cow, and a dog.

Like in Kentridge’s work, dominant male figures appear which plumb the philosophic weight and poetry of the story.
In Mosley’s film DREAD the central human characters are Rousseau and Pascal. These heavyweights of French philosophy have a poetic form of a conversation about God, Free Will, and the status of the “human beings” in relation to the "animals"

In a much less obvious way than Kentridge or Opie, Mosley compounds several forms of media, where you don’t know exactly what came first. The backgrounds are digitally scanned photographs, the figures are digitally scanned and sculptures are turned into stop-motion digital puppets. Yet, the physical versions of the figures are then cast in bronze and exhibited along with the animated film. (confusing?) Mosley slyly entangles his materials. The chicken-or-the-egg feeling is evoked as one media practice is daisy-chained to the others.

Arguably closer to Kentridge than to Opie: Mosley seems to suggest a preciousness to every stage of production, just as every drawing is seminal to Kentridge. Mosley’s bronze sculptures, whose predecessors were used in his animation, are exhibited as enduring physical sculpture, and have a unique and curious identity, like talismans. In this way, his use of animation is quite different to either Kentridge or Opie.

-to see animated excerpts of DREAD and other work, go to his website, and click on "dread" under the animation category.

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JOSHUA MOSLEY has a exhibition coming up at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, May 11-July 13, ‘08
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EXITING STATEMENT:

All three artists have created animation that perhaps could be seen as an offsshoot to their main practice, yet as their art work evolved, animation co-evolved with it, and arguably, was always there from the very beginning.. Trying to undress their practice without addressing the pop-culture and entertainment expectations of animation, might the be trickiest line to follow.

END LECTURE