Primordial Soup Cartoon from Eric Waldemar on Vimeo.

Several notable curiosities came out of last fall’s “Time and Attention” show, and not everything got included in the gallery exhibition. Here’s a sort of image poem that tells of the emergence of life and form on Earth. Interpretive dance, perhaps. This should give you a decent sense of what it was like back then for those ambitious little critters. Millions of years are compressed into a couple of minutes, so bear with me if I missed anything important.

Several people asked me about relationships between the ink drawings in Time and Attention and the prints. Many of the drawings were made during a period when I was working on images for Richard Loranger’s book Poems for Teeth.  Working with black ink and a brush, a drawing either coalesces or goes wrong. No reworking is really possible, and many are destroyed. One commits to a mark, uncertain of why, and with luck and grace, something emerges, vivid and surprising. Monotype, on the other hand (which makes up much of the exhibition) allows endless reworking, and an image can change into another image and yet another over the course of several hours. Still, though, there’s a moment where one has to commit, and run the plate through the press, and, like a gestural ink drawing, the image either coalesces or fails to work, irrevocably. The best images are often transformed by the press and come as a surprise, just as my favorite ink drawings startle me and make me feel like a fortunate spectator in a process I direct, but don’t really comprehend.

Eric Waldemar: Time & Attention from Eric Waldemar on Vimeo.

Representation may not be the point, exactly, but I often do enjoy it when “pictures” appear. In general, I find that in general, apparently non-objective works tend to begin as deliberate “pictures of something,” while on the other hand, virtually none of the most apparently mimetic works actually began that way. Whatever I try to do, turns into something else, and then I do the best I can to follow it to its destination.

A few of the 111 sheets from The Unsecret Block. The simplest way through each brief moment of animation is to go down each column from the top left. There are many other ways to navigate the block. Movies to come in the near future.

Over 1600 images on 111 sheets. This “block” is threaded through in a variety of ways to create three distinct pieces of animated visual music. This installation, which includes both video and still images, will appear as the centerpiece of “Time & Attention,” opening at Ironton on October 23rd. Esoteric secrets of abstract animation will be laid bare. Related drawings, prints, and cinema will also appear. Movie bits will appear on this site as the show approaches. Contact me to make sure you’re kept informed.

While movies assemble still images into various illusions of motion, monotype printmaking compels one to select and freeze a moment in a fluid work process. Some of these images include multiple “drops,” which makes the concept of “moment” somewhat more complex. A series of decisive instants are rendered as simultaneous, by way of translucent stratification.

“Images in series often implicitly refer to temporality, but few serial works delve into time and space as directly and viscerally as Eric Waldemar’s new multimedia works, which will appear in Time and Attention at Ironton, starting on October 23rd. In The Unsecret Block, the centerpiece of the show, Waldemar teases rhythm and motion from an intricate matrix of over 1600 images, taking a variety of routes through a “block” of 111 sheets. A twenty-year endeavor to merge drawing and cinema arrives at some sort of momentary culmination this fall, and it should not be missed. “

Moving images soon to come. Keep an eye on this site, or, even better, subscribe by email or RSS.