ICC
Openspace2015
works
"Juggler"
1997
Gregory BARSAMIAN
* ICC Collection

photo: OHTAKA Takashi

A juggler throws a phone receiver up into the air, which then transforms in turn into a baby bottle, milk spilling out of it, a dice, and a bone. The bone finally comes down on a parachute, and turns into a phone again before landing back in the juggler's hand. The scenery of multiple jugglers standing in a circle facing outward while repeating the same movements over and over again seems at once like a somewhat surreal and immaterial image.

Just like serial photographs or pictures in a flip book, the continuous motion of the juggler and the things he juggles has been segmented, and each momentary frame materialized in an individual three-dimensional object. These objects were arranged in equal intervals around a large cylindrical frame that rotates at a high speed in a dark space. The entire structure is illuminated by stroboscopic light, and like in animation, the added element of time creates an illusionary notion of "movement" to the still objects.

Commissioned by ICC, "Juggler" expresses aspects of hope and conflict between man and machine – in fact one central theme in BARSAMIAN's work. BARSAMIAN consistently produces animations based on three-dimensional sculptures in combination with the mechanism of the zoetrope, an imaging machine invented in the 19th century. The results are dream-like images that have escaped logic and certainty through the machine-generated effects of repetition and afterimages.

Gregory BARSAMIAN Profile
Born 1953. Influenced by Jungian psychology, has been tape-recording fragments of his dreams since 1983. His works are based on this database of the artist's own dreams. Appearing like scenes of a dream, these works animated by rotating three-dimensional zoetropes deal with a wide range of topics, from irony, humor and individual to universal matters.
Past Exhibition / Event