100 Sinkholes

Installation including 16mm film loop, ink drawings on watercolor paper.

Film is 16mm, b/w, silent, 14:10, 2014

The full work of 100 Sinkholes also comprises one hundred ink drawings of abstracted, miniaturized, colorful sinkholes arranged in a grid on the freestanding wall, behind which a film loop of the same images hand-animated in black and white 16mm graphic animation runs incessantly.

In the film 100 Sinkholes, I methodically and systematically catalogued one hundred individual sinkholes, sourced from online data. The film renders these images in graphite, each insistently filling the emptiness of the void. As a sinkhole emerges, it quickly disappears into the unsteady rhythm of the animation.

The film scholar Joshua Guilford recently wrote about 100 Sinkholes: “The film, which is thrown onto the rear surface of the wall separating these spaces, presents images of the same sinkholes rendered in graphite and arranged in a linear sequence. Each drawing emerges in steps through a process of single-frame animation, then holds momentarily as an image before giving way to the next. The runtime of the film is just over 14 minutes, but the print is joined end to end, with no title card to designate a beginning or conclusion. One after another, a hundred sinkholes cycle in an unbroken loop, surfacing relentlessly but accumulating nothing, emerging to collapse, emerging in collapsing. Through circularity, the film’s time is made to fold, returning by extending forward, progressing to return. Each new image becomes an echo and the gallery itself a sort of eddy that echoes the swirl of celluloid atop the projector. Between the viewing space and the images onscreen, a resonance arises: time as a blot suspended in the white cube.”[1]

 This work was exhibited at Simon Preston Gallery, New York, in 2015 and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year.

[1] Joshua Guilford, “One Hundred and One Sinkholes: Notes on the Film Loop,”  http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/09/one-hundred-and-one-sinkholes/ (September 19 2016)