* No Normal Festival 2023 * Official Selection International Portrait Festival 2022 * Gallery Stratford Installation 2022/23 * Official Selection Recontres Internationales Traverse Festival 2022 * Official Selection Athens Animfest 2022 * Official Selection Forest City Film Festival 2021 * Carbon Art & Design Installation 2021 * Bark Park/Washing Machine Outdoor Installation NYC 2021 * Official Selection Van Der Plas Animation Festival & Installation 2021 Springboarding off original illustrations by the internationally renowned artist Jason McLean, What You Are Out Here For experiments with experimental film-making itself, putting McLean’s art for the first time into motion. The open-ended and coming-of-age beginnings of a day tripper take us from ladders to subways, from subways into tunnels of abstract expressionism, and finally into a series of far flung locales in outer realms. Drawing upon original music by composer Jason Zumpano, New-York based Canadian artist Jason McLean has created surreal characters and tableaus, set into rotoscope-like motion by New York artist Jimi Pantalon. Guided by a narrative composed by Jason Zumpano, who’s also taken on the role of director, the overall effect of this ensemble of idiosyncratic creators is a one of a kind animation lying somewhere between the liminal and subliminal. What You Are Out Here For is a meditative quest that mounts a total sensorium of unmediated trippiness. “The Odyssey without heroes, without excessive adventures, without encounters with beings sent by the gods to disturb or help… yet, “he” crosses unusual places or assignable to social functions without real location, acts as a human who seeks, lodges in rooms, discusses with others and always, “it” advances towards. Sometimes he allows himself stops, with his back in front of various landscapes transforming on view, hills but also a desert island, becoming an oasis, buildings in flat geometry or in volume, river. Sometimes he leads in front of the underground advances of the metro/polysemic underground in American in accordance with this writing outside the genres. The promise of “what” he goes from place to place is never explicit… no words, rarely words written in the field markers of worry or even pain: speeding a head/mental acceleration? lost/lost; memory/memory; cold /cold; grievance/mourning; change no change / change without change (redubbed), a fourth avenue on dislocated buildings and the title on a panel brandished in front of the metro and an untranslatable: viel. Just as improbable, the beings encountered with approximate or square heads, deformed bodies with sometimes coloring around them far from human complexion, or those with a more flagrant strangeness, with a large head and four short legs. The places, also out of agreed forms, also surrounded by moving lines of color in fluorescent blue, red or other far from the canons of construction, erase the details on an itinerary and on the reason for the journey. And the gaps towards the real disturb the non-logic: seated behind a desk, he changes place, finds himself behind bars; the bed designates the room taking the metro, it is covered with a spacesuit transforming the vehicle into an interplanetary nave or is held in brown-red space. Similarly, the more human signs, such as amazed or smiling faces, the labial movements of such others paradoxically disturb the possibility of an answer by their unexpected familiarity in these spaces. The hovering musical environment sometimes gets carried away in organ sounds, exalts and favors the resumption, the loop. The fulgurance and the threat, although always softened on edge of sound, permeate the advances in perspectives marked at the point of vanishing vanishing, the changes of places created as and when journeys by metro, entry into unlocatable houses, or in such a deserted bar, or such places of leisure with deformed fish like all beings there, elsewhere, a Japanese movement connotes elsewhere but without any relation to the place. Thus, beyond an itinerary to be reconstituted, the variations would embark on an interior journey that various shots connote. Very precisely, the incipit draws a face between the hands which, very significantly, is reiterated later; it inaugurates this direction towards the voyage in memory or the recapitulation of a life. Mother to child enjoys variations of designs and plans; the child playing outside near plants and stones, the teenager curled up or on his knees; the young man in a group with friends, or alone at the table would form this diary of life chanted once with a happy tick that turns into musical phrasing. And the few words would find their reading including that of the street name. This inner journey is reinvented there; inviting the framing and unrealistic colors, the color variations of the backgrounds, he readjusts the encounters… he escapes from the codes of truth as well as the undulating lines or made of irregular circles, the reversals of the models in metonymy from one animation to several hands, staggering in its creation of its own world, where each strangely can lodge. Which solves the title. What You Are Out Here For experiments with experimental cinema itself, animating original artwork by Jason McLean, for the first time in motion. On the original music of Jason Zumpano, Canadian artist living in New York, Jason McLean created different figures set in motion by rotoscoping by the New York artist, Jimi Pantalon. What You Are Out Here For in meditative quest composes a total sensorium of “trippiness” without mediation.”– Simone Dompeyre, President and Artistic Director of Traverse Video in Toulouse
