projectscreen

Marina Zurkow
February 16–March 18, 2012

An exclusive program at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, projectscreen presents video art by contemporary artists working regionally, nationally, and internationally. The video series rotates monthly in the Museum’s lobby, presenting the work of 12 artists each year, and is guest curated by Shannon Fitzgerald.

The inaugural projectscreen features New York-based artist Marina Zurkow’s two videos titled Slurb and Weights + Measures. For over a decade, Zurkow has been generating intoxicatingly beautiful animated videos. She creates unexpected juxtapositions to explore several facets about our complex ecosystem and more profoundly, human interventions in biology and technology.

Brimming with symbolic content, Slurb and Weights + Measures, convey a sense of urgency, fragility, and loss in an undetermined and uncertain future as the past coalesces in the present. The plight of Zurkow’s cartoon-based inhabitants presents struggle and perseverance as universal, inferring that necessity, process, and hope is global. While Zurkow’s work poignantly elicits anxiety, there is an enchanting balladry within the animations and perhaps because of the performative visual allure and ethereal atmosphere, the substantial inherent psychological agency and concern emerges quite evocatively.

Slurb, a single-channel digital color animation, is a seamless floating narrative that features multiple human and animal characters attempting to navigate an unknown, debris-filled, quasi-apocalyptic watery world where futility and optimism merge, hauntingly amplified by the accompanying soundtrack. In a fluid field of blue and gray, Slurb’s structure echoes traditional Chinese scroll painting as continuous information is revealed from left to right, simultaneously building anticipation while eliciting deep emotion with simple gestures. Unfolding in this panoramic story—all engulfed in a deluge—are either somber or whimsical individuals struggling to return to safe ground, harvest food, and survive.

Weights + Measures occurs in a mysterious watery other-world with non-human characters, human-made airplanes, majestic elephants, and microscopic marine organisms. A dream-like choreography transpires in slow moving, floating gestures that defy gravity and direction. As a silent animation, Weights + Measures takes a tranquil and moving inventory beneath the surface with the presentation of impossible co-existences. Three striking, but surprising juxtapositions levitate and drift in their translucent forms that challenge notions of light and darkness, and mass and weightlessness. Overlaid and moving in and out of the picture plane, airplanes spiral and sink, elephants gracefully swim, and organisms multiply all within a luminous calm.

In both videos, Zurkow brings forth weighty ideas and burdensome circumstances in potent, yet exquisite combinations.

Upcoming Artists + Dates

March 21–April 22, 2012
Catharina van Eetvelde

April 25–May 27, 2012
Barry Anderson

May 30–July 1, 2012
Allison Schulnik