Three Seconds of Recall
When you think back on the last 24 hours, you probably remember the highlights — a conversation with a friend, an important business meeting, a good meal. What about the other parts of your day, such as the hour you spent on the subway, or your walk to work? Artist
Alexander Schellow explores these less conscious images of memory and the process of recall in brief three-second animated films that are both captivating and elusive. He has just produced a series of new works, wherein everyday urban scenes are rendered flutteringly in dots, not lines, appearing for a short three seconds before the screen goes black. A moment later, the scene appears again and the sequence then repeats in a loop of alternating motion and nothingness. At first glance, it is hard to grasp what is going on. Only at the second or third viewing do the images start to make visual sense. A woman in the subway glances up. A man on a bench leans towards his friend. People shift positions while waiting in line or getting money from the bank machine.
When one is accustomed to dramatic newsflashes on TV, spectacular action-filled clips on the Internet, or even dramatic black-and-white scenes from old documentary footage, these films seem to have a perplexing banality. Schellow purposely avoids any images or scenes that he finds artistically compelling or dramatic; they are simple, ordinary vignettes that the artist has observed on the street and recorded (initially through sketches, more recently through memory alone). They are scenes that no one would ever bother to remember after a busy day. This is where three seconds become important. According to neurological studies, three seconds play a key role in our short-term memory. It is the amount of time the brain uses to scan our surroundings for change. In other words, the brain bundles three seconds into the smallest unit of memory. Anything beyond three seconds is perceived as before and after, past and future.
For Schellow these three seconds are extremely labor intensive. A single short film can mean a month of drawing; each frame is drawn from scratch. His films have a lightness that does not give any hint of their labor-intensive production. Some of his motifs pulse more than move through time. For Schellow, drawing is an act of concentration in which each frame must be rethought and redrawn individually: “Thus one tries to reconstruct what one has perceived with the knowledge that what one reconstructs is obviously never really what was perceived ...” As documentary as his images seem, they are literally “projections” of a perceived reality. Ultimately, they point to the unsettling possibility: what we recall from our own experience is more fictional and less factual than we would like to believe.
Link:http://www.galerie-parduhn.de
