Verónica López Metro Pictures is presenting a different artist’s film or series of shorts each weekend to stream online from Friday at noon until Sunday at midnight (Eastern Time).
This week we are screening two short films by Oliver Laric. In Untitled hybrid creatures mutate from human to object to animal to machine, expressing the complex dynamic between human and nonhuman lifeforms. Betweenness continues Laric’s exploration of metamorphosis. He constructed the animation via an exacting technique in which each line moves continually between sequences—in contrast with traditional techniques in which each sequence consists of a series of redrawn frames. As the shapes perpetually transform, the sense of a narrative unfolds. These films are the first two parts of a trilogy; a third animation is scheduled to debut in a one-person exhibition in January 2021 at S.M.A.K. Ghent.
Betweenness (film still), 2018-. 4K video with sound, 4 minutes 48 seconds.
Both films were included in his solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum last year and have been presented internationally: Untitled in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, New York; at the Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv; Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; New Museum at The Store X, London; Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia; and Tramway, Glasgow. Betweenness premiered at Metro Pictures in 2018 and has been exhibited at the 6th Guangzhou Triennial, China; 33rd Bienal de São Paulo; and Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany. Both works will be included in Meditations in an Emergency at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing at the end of this month.
