Curated by Adriane Little, Director, Frostic School of Art and Professor of Kinetic Imaging

Postponed from the spring of 2020, Naomi van Niekerk’s solo exhibition in the Kerr Gallery will feature prints, objects, and a series of short films animated on a light table with a camera affixed. Titled Interval, the exhibition originates from the idea of archiving and making a residue of ephemeral performances and films created across the past five years. For Niekerk, this reworking of images as etchings or linocuts is an attempt to prolong or evoke the experience of a film or theatre piece.

The printing press, in this instance, also functions as a photographic device, in that it takes impressions at a specific moment, the instant in which a plate has been prepared, inked up, and deemed print ready. The process is similar to capturing a frame after sufficiently altering an image for stop-motion animation, which, by its very nature, slows down motion or makes it stop. Film being both an analog and a digital medium, what is perceived as a few seconds of action in film actually took days to create; fractions of an event were carefully recorded with a camera, move by move. From this perspective, it is as if the filmmaker-animator grasps time and alters it. She can distill instances as well as reverse actions in fluid transitions. Here the artist’s process might be interpreted as a game of slowing down and accelerating both motion and time.

Niekerk says, “My interest in slowing down and decomposing movement dates back to my training as a puppeteer. I recall a specific exercise: two participants hold on to a broom with the tip of their index fingers, taking turns in moving and allowing the other to nudge them in a certain direction. It is an intense exercise in practicing stillness while responding to micro-impulses. The animation of the inanimate other through touch is what drew me to animation years later, hence my impulse to create a series of animated short films. To move material and allow oneself to be moved over distance is at the core of stop-motion animation and my artistic practice.”

In tandem with her exhibition at the Richmond Center, Niekerk will teach a spring course at the Frostic School of Art in the recently founded Kinetic Imaging area.