I’m working on a new video project with the help of Cindy Mochizuki at VIVO Media Arts Centre. We’re using Adobe After Effects to create an animated video using a series of scanned drawings.

Here are a some of the drawings we’re using:

These drawings are part of a long-term drawing project called Reunion, I exhibited within a number of different contexts between 2001 and 2005. Here’s a description of this project:

Each of the hundreds of drawings within Reunion is based on the same photograph of my mother, taken when she was approximately the same age I am now. The blurred and out-of-focus images are drawn with graphite powder and brushes on translucent sheets of vellum. They represent a gestural and intuitive response to the photo, rather than articulate renderings.

Installed together in a random, overlapping fashion the drawings create a flickering portrait of an ambiguous face that shifts and dissolves from one image to the next. My mother died more than ten years ago, so these drawings represent a way of calling forth memories of her and her presence. As I move through my middle age, the same period of life that I best remember her, I become increasingly aware of my own mortality and gain new insights into her life and death.

While the image of my mother obviously has personal significance, I am also interested in the non-specific characteristics of this face. Individual drawings make it difficult to determine its age, gender, expressions, etc. As these characteristics become confused the field of interpretation expands. Although these images are produced with a minimal amount of information, the instantly recognizable features of the face still evoke strong associations. The distorted and blurred images appear both grotesque and transcendent.

Cindy’s recent interactive website project for The Japanese Canadian National Museum, March to Decemberhere. can be seen