Rob Carter [US]

Rob Carter studied Fine Arts in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Since his studies he resides in Brooklyn/NY. He has been exhibiting throughout the US and Europe, with his participation during NARRACJE he makes his first appearance in Poland.
He uses photography, stop-motion animation, and time-lapse video to spotlight urban landmarks and landscapes and their shifting cultural significance. His starting points are digitally manipulated and/or physically cut out photographic images of specific city sites, iconic buildings and identity endowing landscapes. In a playful process of construction and deconstruction, of de- and reformation he approaches formal aspects, socio-cultural contexts and natural implications. His video narratives stage a dialogic encounter of natural and cultural developments in urban environments in a process of constant motion and change. They are esthetical reflections on urban and cultural developments and metaphors for shifting identities that render visible the nature/culture dichotomy.

www.robcarter.net

NARRACJE 2011 Work: Culte, Stone on Stone
co-curator: Iwona Bigos

The two channel HD video projection shows architectural mockups of an interaction with plant life. His idea is to show �śthe irrepressible strength of nature that our buildings attempt to shield us from, as well as the temporality and fluidity of the environs we inhabit”.

Culte (2010)
Culte is a high definition, two-channel video projected onto adjacent right-angled walls. The product of an eight-month period of time-lapse photography, it uses architectural and plant imagery to conflate ideas of mysticism and the concrete, of illusion and devotion. Initially the viewer observes a tangle of dead plants that reabsorb their fluids and return to life. As the video develops the plants appear to grow and shrink and ultimately ‘un-grow’, burying themselves back into the soil from which they once emerged.

Stone on Stone (2009)
This stop-motion video animation uses the architectural language of High Gothic and Modernism to invent a contradictory history of their evolvement. The theme starts and finishes with the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, located on the upper west side of Manhattan. This vast anachronistic building lies unfinished and partially ruined after over a century of intermittent construction and restoration. The re-created 13th century medieval construction unintentionally symbolizes those eventful years of indecision, tragedy and changes in the meaning and purpose of the city’s architecture and landscape, especially its religious buildings.

NARRACJE 2011 Location: Gdansk City Gallery (GGM) 2, Powroźnicza 15/16