Western Skies, You Are Forgiven

JIM OVELMEN

participating in the group show, WEST IS MORE, curated by Veronica Duarte

more info on group show: click here

UPstairs At The Market Gallery
1057 South San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, CA 90015

March 15 - April 3, 2012

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, March 15, 6:30 - 9:30 PM

    
   

stills from animation, Jim Ovelmen 2012 (b/w test projection)

from bio video: here
Western Skies, You Are Forgiven is a 9-minute looping animated video for projection on a building façade created in response to the group show titled West is More. The façade belongs to the nondescript City Market building, in a historic but now amalgamated industrial area of 9th and San Pedro Streets in Los Angeles. The video was created with the building and the area in mind.

In the animation, there is scenery reminiscent of graphic science-fiction films, where multiple moons exoticize outer space with an implacable curtain of stars.
The images were first created with a black scratchboard technique, then colorized and animated.

There are seven strange floating objects, “satellites”, that oddly
twist and drift by. They resemble primitive devices of wood, nails, wheels, and rope winches, etc. These “satellites” register more sinister than odd, as they are designed to resemble torture or execution equipment from the dark ages. The bright space fantasy perception is belied with this bleak example of medieval western technology.

The animation is a direct response to the title/concept West is More: a provocative phrase that may immediately fabricate an idea of East or West, (North or South) in a wildly reductive or stereotypical way. Is this a concept so broad, loaded, or vague as to be completely open to any reactive interpretation?

Western Skies, You Are Forgiven as a response and a creative answer presenting the “western frontier” as a fantasy of colorful expansion into zones where geography becomes meaningless or absurd… What time is it in space?

Fantasies of technological threat and machiavellian use of fear might may not be distinctly occidental but it is often imagined so in cinema and fiction. “Western Skies” embodies the idea that even things in outer space can be bluntly perceived as geographic. “You Are Forgiven” suggests the emotional legacy in the historical misuse of technology and the assumption of both blame and charity.

Jim Ovelmen
3/12/12