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Animated Suspension: Halfway Here

India Art Summit, New Delhi

Excerpt from a 12 min performance-based stop-motion animation where Singh first creates the drawn illusion of her bedroom with all its objects and then seems to move these (illusory) objects by drawing, erasing and redrawing them on the architecture and on her own body.

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Installation view with projection

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Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

Stills from a performance-based stop-motion animation where Singh first creates the drawn illusion of her bedroom with all its objects and then seems to move these (illusory) objects by drawing, erasing and redrawing them on the architecture and on her own body.

Stills from a performance-based stop-motion animation where Singh first creates the drawn illusion of her bedroom with all its objects and then seems to move these (illusory) objects by drawing, erasing and redrawing them on the architecture and on her own body.

View on screen

Project Description: Viewers first encounter what appears to be a projected drawing of the artist’s bedroom, to suddenly find people walking through it & even cutting through the drawn objects. Investigating behind this projection, they walk through a zig-zag of interlocked spaces with skewed charcoal drawings splattered over architectural surfaces, slowly watching themselves as they appear onscreen in the illusory bedroom created by the alignment of these fractured drawings.

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For Animated Suspension: Halfway Here, Singh generates a performance-based stop-motion animation where she first creates the drawn illusion of her bedroom with all its objects and then seems to move these (illusory) objects by drawing, erasing and redrawing them on the architecture and on her own body. The actual room with its maze of familiar yet elusive charcoal drawings splattered in fractured shapes over the architectural surfaces, devoid of perspectival unity was installed at the India Art Summit 2011. Viewers in the corridors approached what looked like a projected black and white drawing (8ft X 6ft) of the artist’s bedroom. Then suddenly people were seen walking in and out of the drawing, sometimes disconcertingly cutting through a picture frame, a table or walking through the middle of a laptop. Further investigation revealed the room behind the projection; the 3 dimensional arena generating the 2 dimensional image. Viewers entered and began walking through a zig-zag of spaces with skewed lines and tones, turning a corner to see themselves on screen (the back of the projection they had seen from the outside corridor) and find themselves located in the artist’s bedroom. People stayed in there for long periods of time, familiarizing themselves with the new laws of this mico-universe: watching themselves in 2 dimensional “there” (onscreen) and while simultaneously locating themselves in the 3 dimensional “here”, investigating what implications their actions in this space would have on the other.

The artist says “This ability to be in multiple spaces at once is pretty commonly understood through Facebook, Skype and Second Life. Our “everyday” is quite extraordinary as our experiences of immediacy can now be accessed in simultaneity. Often we even locate our direct experiences through the mediated. I have also been generating performance-based stop motion animations where I question these phenomena through attempts to interact with these virtual objects on a physical plane. I move around the physical room seeming to re-arrange/ re-locate the already drawn objects, attempting to hold, push, lift or pull them, as if they were real. This is done by erasing and re-rendering the drawn objects on the various surfaces and planes of the room, shifting the drawings inch by inch, leaving behind a William-Kentridge-like animated trace of their trajectory through 3 dimensional objects and space. Part of this investigation has sprung up from the reading of Yogic texts that claim material form is an illusionary construct (maya) that we give reality to. The animations become a way of asking myself “well, how much effort does it take to constantly interact with things that aren’t real?”