Catalogue > At random

Drawing upon the name of earthly paradise in Greek mythology, the film ‘Fortunate Isles: Landings’ explores the awakening of sentience and biological complexity within digital images. To fully inhabit utopian and cinematic visions of analog & digital interpretations of landscape, ‘Fortunate Isles: Landings’ is filmed on location at sites of human achievement and continuous habitation; the level Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah and remote cliffs of Salvage, Newfoundland. During filming, performers wore chroma-key suits on location that, in post-production, allow the suit’s geometric faces to be digitally blanked and replaced with hand-drawn animation. Through the dialogue of gaps and joins created by the subtle collapsed spaces between layers of inter-narrative animation, questions of evolution, reality, and wonder begin to surface. The figures each carry a drawn experience inscribed into their outer forms. A patina of frames progressing forward echoes an imprinted memory; Landscapes are portable.

Jacob Rivkin is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA, USA. His animations and sculptures focus on how we experience and internalize landscape, memory, and desire. His work has exhibited widely, including at the Arlington Arts Center, the Chemical Heritage Foundation Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Animation Block Party, and the National Museum of Australia. He holds lecturer positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and BA from Vassar College in 2007. His awards include selection as a finalist for the anthropoScene Film Competition in 2016, a Fulbright Student Grant in 2008 to study Chinese Traditional Landscape Painting in Hangzhou, China, and the Weitzel Barber Art Travel Prize in 2006 to study Buddhist Sculpture Practices in Western China. He is a member of the OOF Animation Collective and in 2014 he was an Artist-in-Residence at the Hacktory in Philadelphia, PA.