«VISIONARY DREAMS #3245-3351» 4 video installations in the halls of the gallery
Anna Frants is a New York-based video and net artist. Usually internet serves as a network that hosts many individual, fully encapsulated, unconnected artistic efforts. These artistic islands, despite occasionally referencing each other, do not form an internet-aesthetic whole. Nor has the internet yet been used as a means to build works of art requiring a high degree of artistic collaboration, not possible in the physical world. Anna Frants is known to work on projects that would bring different artists together, embracing the greatest communication medium that ever existed — the Internet.
Her accomplishments reflect the broad range of interests she has. She has been awarded the top prize for the best 3D computer animation at the prestigious computer graphics competitions such as Autodesk Planet Studio Award. She has participated in and curated numerous art exhibitions in United States and Russia, for number of years have been teaching media studies and animation and also published articles on art. Works can be found in KyoseinoSato Contemporary Art Museum (Japan) and in private collections.
Connecting life as an artist in Russia and in America, Frant’s video is set in a frozen, harsh and unforgiving setting where occupants are filmed amidst routine of working hard to find and claim their daily bread. Among the crowd, one bird has notably different movements and it becomes clear he/she is sick or injured. Set to Beethoven’s Sonata, the impeded pigeon is the weakest in the bunch but nonetheless uniquely different, and thus rises as the star.
1.”Fur die stadt” (for the city). Pigeons foraging in cold snow of St Petersburg this past winter migrate all the way to New York for spring. Anna Frants’ multimedia installations of Russian city street pigeons scavenging for food have landed on both sides of the East River. Undeterred by the bustling public street around them, Frants video/sound projections of feathered city inhabitants went about their business in the front window of Dam Stuhltrager Gallery in Brooklyn at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan and now returned to St. Petersburg’s Borey Gallery.
2.“Made in Ancient Greece, 1928” is second piece from series of freestanding video sculptures that introduces unlikely, from the conservative point of view, but perfect marriage of traditional art form and moving images/ Hollywood style that transformed later to style of Soviet cinema of Stalin era. Ridiculing snobbishness of our conventional thinking, sculpture plays on principles of our vision, time that long term memory takes to pulls out clichés, and perfect proportions of the Greek pottery. Footage was shot in 1928-1936 by young cameraman Vyacheslav Alekseevich Burgov who later became legend of Russian sound technology.
3.”At the double”. Slides, slide projector, sound system What would happen if we didn’t see 30 shots per second (thanks to Lumiere brothers) but registered only the pictures deserving our look? What if we studied to sift this visual trash? Installation ” At the double ” uses the technology of slides, which has already become antique, but as it often happens in art with items from the past, slide-projectors render the idea better than all modern devices.
4.”Nord west”. Interactive video installation. Can one move a cloud? The logic ingrained in how one distinguishes a common setting such as a cloud in the sun’s rays is skewed. By rotating the handle of the mechanism viewer can move cloud or rather cloud’s shadow around the room. Video and sound are utilized to manipulate light, contrast, touch and “reversity” within the installation, producing an environment where nothing is rationally as it is naturally perceived. As spectators enter the frame of projected light- he/she participates in the creation of an image and is transported, on the associative level, to a suggested world by inference.
Borey Art Center December 3, 2009
