Gary Barwin Part #2: Inverting the Deer. 2010

-

Inverting the deer. 2010

Over the past eight years, my .gif(t)ing practice has engaged extensively with the visual poetics of Canadian author and poet Gary Barwin, whose work I have frequently translated into animated form. Describing Barwin’s work succinctly is difficult, as his imagination and creative approach are remarkably wide-ranging—moving deftly between the absurd, the lyrical, and the cosmic. Yet one constant to which I continually return is his enduring sense of wonder: an attentiveness to nature, the stars, the cosmos, and our shifting orientation as human beings within these vast networks. Inverting the Deer (from his collection The Porcupinity of the Stars, Coach House Books, 2010) exemplifies this sensibility. The work features a deer, drawn with naturalistic precision, yet crowned not with antlers but with constellations (one of which is Andromeda). The image stages a surreal and arresting metaphor: antlers as antennae, a terrestrial creature becoming a conduit between earth and the cosmos. The substitution suggests an intermedial ecology, where the natural and the astronomical, the biological and the celestial, are poetically conjoined.

I saw in the original image the suggestion of an eternal cycle of cosmic proportions, and I hoped my re-animation of his work would reconfigure/expand the work to acquire a temporal dimension. The flicker and pulse of the constellation as if the stars themselves were alive, transmitting signals through the deer’s body enacts the idea of mediation. The animation performs what the still image implies: a kind of interstellar communication, where the deer becomes both receiver and transmitter, embodying a porousness between the earthly and the cosmic. The .gif’s looping temporality also underscores Barwin’s playful poetics of wonder: the sense that such cosmic transmissions are ongoing, without beginning or end, continuously replaying themselves across both the night sky and the screen.

In this way, my animated adaptation of Inverting the Deer attempts to honor as well as amplify Barwin’s surrealist gesture, literalizing the connective force between creature and cosmos, nature and star-field, text and moving image.











Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Decides the Land is Sacred?

-
Image
Who Decides the Land is Sacred? 2017 As this is my first blog/entry I'll start with a brief intro. I'm an artist working across a broad range of processes, mediums and modes (you can see my work at aureolestudios.com ) who also has a deep love of visual (concrete) poetry . This blog will not feature my own work per se (well, for the most part) but will feature the works of visual poets whose efforts I've been inspired to appropriate/hijack/hack and respond to. Using Adobe Photoshop I re-visualize their texts using basic digital stop-motion movement, the results are infinitely (usually) looping animations.  I've been riffing on what I call a .gif economy for three years now and have a backlog of these works that I will share once a week or so and will intersperse these posts with new animations as they are made along with a few thoughts, ruminations and ramblings (or not) on the process and purpose at hand.   For my first post I've decided to share an ...
Read more

Gary Barwin Part #1: Fictional Bird Jazz

-
Image
Fictional Bird Jazz.   2025. Canadian multi-disciplinary artist Gary Barwin engages fluidly across literary, visual, and sonic forms of expression, frequently integrating these modes with striking sophistication and conceptual depth. His recent time-based work Fictional Bird Jazz exemplifies this approach by presenting a video in which words, rendered as bird-like figures, traverse a black field in tandem with a languid jazz soundtrack that echoes their motions. As the textual-birds move through negative space, they fleetingly disclose fragments of an obscured underlying text, without ever revealing either the birds or the words in their entirety. The text is simultaneously legible and illegible, present and deferred as the avian word-forms wing through the darkness. Neither bird-forms or verbal content achieve full presence; instead, meaning here emerges in an obscure space between visibility and erasure reminding me of some of Cy Twombly's so-called blackboard works. The resulti...
Read more

Laura Kerr

-
Image
An apparition is a dead poem which is believed to appear or  become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image . 2020. Unlike the works I've shared so far, this week's beguiling and haunting visual poem by Laura Kerr features an image-based strategy containing no text. Her piece (and the accompanying title/epigram) describes a poem as an ambiguous construct that appears in shape-shifting form. The elusive visual syntax of the image, unstable, surreal and contingent both intrigues and unsettles the reader/viewer. Featuring no entry or exit points it is a challenging and uncanny space in which mystery and alternate universes might abound. Like a hall of mirrors that is simultaneously (and strangely) full and empty, it feels like an empty space waiting for a story to arrive. The framed image of a bedroom within a bedroom (within yet another bedroom > ) is patrolled by a floating dot (masquerading as a period?) that traces its elongated rectangular pa...
Read more