Thursday, August 26, 2010

Exhibiting Artist : Netta Bacon









Pack
features a straightforward yet enigmatic gesture : A hand is held out. It closes into a fist. A glass glove appears to encase the fisted hand like a clear casket that fixes the body in space and time.The hand opens up and reaches out of the glove, as though it were just a memory.

In her attempt to trace lines of meaning between a concrete gesture, the association and its fleeting memory, Bacon maintains a constant rhythm of adding and dropping frames. Speaking about her process, Bacon says,"Frames were printed on transparent paper. The body becomes transparent like the glass boxing glove. Frames were then piled one on top of the other, creating an accumulating image, a pack. As a few frames are added on top, one is taken from the bottom of the pile in a constant rhythm."

The hand is imparted the quality of glass by printing on transparent paper. This is merged with the appearance of the glass glove that is transparent in its materiality. A single image, yet layered. In both a material and metaphorical play of transparency.

The gesture is frozen in the physicality of the boxing glove. Only here, the shifting transparency serves as a ghost to speak of something imaginary. Is the glove, by virtue of being of a real, physical substance protecting the hand or locking it? Yet the hand escapes the glove and we are once again in the realm of an echo. Pack is an incredibly short animation developed from this incredibly intense process.

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