Transient Curated is pleased to present Time After Time, a series of animated works by #1 crush. Styled after medieval religious paintings and bestiary illustrations, each piece cycles rapidly between key compositions, pulling angels, unicorns, monsters and other figures in and out of frame, before resurrecting the cycle and beginning anew.
From the Artist:
TIME AFTER TIME is a love story caught inside a bad signal. Lovers, memes, machines and impossible beings pass through the same strange weather, carrying jokes, bags, moons, promises and other things that should mean nothing. Probably nothing. Somehow they mean everything. Then the signal disappears. Then it comes back. Time after time.
Curator's Note
by Mackenzie Davenport
Prior to the Enlightenment, nearly all artistic production in Western Europe was made on religious, particularly Christian themes. Often having never seen the animals they were depicting, painters would work from bestiaries, books which illustrated and described different animals, both real and imagined. Juggling a need to inspire awe in viewers with a lack of practical knowledge about the wider world, the products of these painters can feel strange.
On the internet, these images are often seen as novelties. TikToks go viral capturing bizarre looking dogs in medieval paintings and ‘biblically accurate angels’ reveal their true terrifying nature on X timelines. Devoid of their original contexts, these figures are seen as pure images, useful for the uncanny quality they possess.
These religious paintings are the basis for the aesthetic of #1 crush's recent series, Time After Time. But unlike their predecessors, made to inspire a calm sense of the divine, these artworks move at a fever pitch. While there are clear key compositions, the works cycle between them so fast that the image is never still, eventually returning to the original frame and looping back again. These transitions occur by cleanly rotating to new simulated camera angles, by pulling figures in and out like paper cut-out puppets, or by some combination of both. The scenes include animals, monsters, unicorns, angels, and all manner of creatures, identifiable and otherwise. Many are depicted with yellow halos above their heads, signifying sainthood. But these symbols mix with smiley faces, rainbows, text, and other modern imagery in Time After Time. The result, though having the composition of a religious painting, is more of a mutated hybrid. It’s within these seemingly contradictory tensions that #1 crush often places their work, somewhere between cute and unnerving, or real and fake. This time between old and new, sacred and profane.
Despite their imposed stone textures, these works are not painted or etched on cathedral walls. They live on screens, flashing to life and disappearing again when not on view, but if you devote yourself for a few moments, watching a work loop over and over again, you might just be able to find a sense of the sacred in the rapidly shifting pixels staring back at you.
CURATED