Kate Hughes - Zoetrope
Mailbox 141
Tuesday 21 December 2010 to Friday 21 January 2011
A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures when the audience peers through slits in the side of the spinning drum to see the images inside. The row of mailboxes with their slit like windows are here envisaged as an unwound flattened out zoetrope. Bringing the parlor game into the foyer.
Where a zoetrope depends on the motion of the images to create the illusion of movement here the sequence of boxes are animated by the audience’s eye motion scanning across the row of repetitious. Populating the space above the boxes are a series of flipbooks echoing the imagery and faltering movement of the boxes bellow when flipped.
The outdated animation methods lend a sense of transience to the debated and conflicted spaces that sit at the nexus of the residential, the industrial and the mythologised outback. Everyone’s role as active or passive bystanders in the creation of this contested landscape is brought to the fore by their breathing life into the landscape in their role as animator when looking across the photos or flipping the books.
