For Jonathan Gillie, the tools were almost incidental. As he puts it, if he weren’t working with electronic media he’d be painting, or cutting up paper and glue: what pulled him in was the act of making itself, the self-reflexive, meditative quality of building something. Animation just happened to come with sound attached. Based in Nottingham, he has worked in moving image since 1997, across video, live projection, animation and sound. His intricately layered, optically shocking work walks the line between representation and abstraction, constructing and deconstructing geometric shapes and spaces into densely detailed compositions. It has screened internationally at MoMA PS1, the Barbican, the Whitechapel Gallery and Cinémathèque Québécoise.
At Kinomural he’s showing State Reduction, a continuation of his exploration of figurative animation, drawing on colour, pattern and geometry and influenced by physicist David Bohm’s ideas of implicate and explicate order. Two central figures are subjected to an accumulation of layered imagery that works as both structure and disruption. Images repeat, impose and intensify until the bodies begin to fracture, dissolve and finally reconfigure into new, unstable forms.
