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THE OPENING is all about introducing the fascinating, quirky and wonderful people working in and around the visual arts in Vancouver. Each week, we'll feature an artist, collective, curator or administrator to delve deep into who and what makes art happen! |
'Torrent'
I’ll admit when I first read about the animated gif as art, I was a bit skeptical. I regularly read a New York art blog called Art Fag City, helmed by Torontonian turned New Yorker Paddy Johnson. Last fall, she curated ‘Graphics Interchange Format’ at Denison University’s Mulberry Gallery (read more here and here), and despite my respect for Johnson’s opinion, I kind of thought she had gone off the deep end.
But then I kept thinking about it. Why do I have an issue with computer generated art? New technology has always struggled in the realm of art – for instance, in its lifetime photography has struggled to be considered art longer than it has been art. So I told myself to stop being close-minded and think about what the medium is capable of that others are not. As a contemporary form of art-making, it can’t get any better – easily transportable and sharable, visually interesting, and not complicated. Then I learned about Nicolas Sassoon (b. 1981), a Vancouver-based French new media artist working in print and animated gif.
Part of the 'Home Land Studies' series
Sassoon uses the animated gif to explore the influence of computer technology on landscape and architecture- a very modern exploration for a very modern media. Computers have allowed us to envision our wildest dreams and create or depict things we never thought possible. Some animations visualize the growth of a plant, or the way light falls across a mountain and the change in geography to our eye as a result. Others show spinning mountains with bars of neon running through them, like futuristic building projects. Sassoon is asking us to look and consider the places around us through the eyes we have created for ourselves: the computer.
The animated gif wasn’t always his primary medium. In France and even after he arrived in Vancouver, he was working on big installation projects. Animated gifs were “something I used to do always in art school, as a fun thing, like jokes for friends.” Installation works requires planning though, so Sassoon also used it for all the preparatory drawings and studies. Arriving in Vancouver with very little money, he began to reconsider his focus, and there was a “shift at some point the way I considered these drawings. An animated gif is this little thing that you are going to watch for 10 seconds. The way I was doing it before I was not really paying that much attention to it, and then it became the center of my practice, the thing I want to focus on.”
Part of the Western Front booth at 'The Fair'
Sassoon is obviously not alone – he is part of an online collective called Computers Club of other artists working in and around new media and the computer, using the internet to disseminate their work, and there are many more than that out there. Though the mainstream art community is still most interested in more traditional forms of art-making, contemporary art seems hell-bent on changing that for this medium and more. As for Sassoon, he never made a distinction between animated gifs or computer drawing, and traditional drawing and painting. “I always looked at it the same,” he notes. “I always appreciated it for it’s aesthetic qualities and I never made a separation, like low art or high art.”
Not all of Sassoon’s practice is animated however – a lot of it involves static drawing. The creation of an actual physical object excites him, and so he also uses much of the same software he uses to create animated gifs to also create computer drawings that can later be printed. For the Western Front booth at ‘The Fair’, Sassoon created computer drawings in the style of a blueprint of Vancouver homes. Other 2-D works have been sourced from previous animations, taking several different views, printing them on a transparent gel, and mounting them on mirrors so they retain some of the original glittery visual of an animation. He also collaborated with fashion designer Risto Bimbiloski, who felt Sassoon’s drawings and animations would translate well into knitting, and so commissioned him to make a drawing that he would knit into clothing. The result is a beautiful dress out of two different wools to create the effect of pixelation on a decidedly non-pixelated medium.
The knit dress by fashion designer Risto Bimbiloski, based on Sassoon's original design
The original dress design (click to enlarge)
When I ask him why he came to Vancouver over staying in Europe, he said he was just ready for something new after school and hopped on a plane with his best friend. They intended to travel around North America, but ended up staying, realizing they loved Vancouver and its art community. People from away often have the most interesting observations about Vancouver in comparison to somewhere else, and Sassoon noted that "the artists from Vancouver are observers of their city, and they talk about their city. That was something so new for me. In France that really didn’t happen. France has 2000-3000 years of history, so there are very few artists who are into local problematics or trying to observe the city, it’s always way more complex." He has been drawing on his own explorations of Vancouver for his work recently as well, and is particularly interested in the condo boom and the role that architectural computer drawing has played in that. Nicolas Sassoon has won me over with his insightful use of the animated gif in these explorations of our landscape and more.
'Promenade'
All images courtesy Nicolas Sassoon.
