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Rochester Art Center presents The Protagonist: Narrative & Animation

Rochester Art Center presents The Protagonist: Narrative & Animation an exhibition on view through August 25, 2013.

Allison Schulnik, Hobo Clown, 2008, stop motion video, 5:05 minutes (still).  Courtesy of Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, CA.
Allison Schulnik, Hobo Clown, 2008, stop motion video, 5:05 minutes (still).
Courtesy of Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, CA.

The Protagonist: Narrative & Animation is a thematic group exhibition that considers narrative storytelling in artist’s short animated films. The exhibition presents work by six internationally recognized artists who have created enthralling film and video work that explores and pushes the boundaries of narrative through the perspective of several highly performative protagonists.

The Protagonist is an exhibition of six artists who innovatively express the human desire and necessity for individuals and collectives to tell their story, give agency to events (real or imagined), and feel the value of communication – as essential to humanity. The artists accomplish this through a variety of unique animation processes and advanced technology. Working with stop short animation, the artists also employ music, poetry, spoken word, literature, and silence to portray a story—a journey, transformation, movement through time, and stillness to address profound social and emotional themes. The protagonist can be implied, invisible, lone, collective, and often literal. Characters, human and non-human, populate and chronicle both united and clearly divided narratives regarding individual and collective experience and/or response to complex themes such as natural and human-made disaster, activism, the environment, nostalgia, commodity, isolation, loneliness, and violence—all poignantly rendered and made palpable through the animated moving image. Each artist also works across artistic disciplines that underscore and inform the distinctive formal compositions and tactile quality of their moving images. The significance of painting, drawing, sculpture, puppetry, photography, and film unfold in linear and non-linear formats activating the environment for which the protagonist begins to navigate- with end, and without end, to yield the notion of spectacle—newly compelling, newly resonate. www.rochesterartcenter.org