Supermedium: Kelan Andrews and Petra Szemán

Kelan Andrews

Alongside life-size animatronics, new pieces for Supermedium see Kelan Andrews working with the labour-intensive method of stop-motion animation as a way to explore aspects of his lived experience from performing mundane daily tasks, like shaving in the mirror, to living with a chronic illness. 

Andrews makes connections between his daily routines and, at times, formative moments and childhood memories. New sculptural works incorporate recordings of his parents’ voices, sections of a model railway, and an unwanted vending machine taken from the artist’s place of work. The unilluminated window of the vending machine would confront Andrews with his own reflection whilst he waited by the lift for his day of work to begin. In the context of his wider work and the themes of this exhibition, a connection can be made between the window, the mirror and the screen as sites where identities, bodies and worlds collide, are created, shared and manipulated. 

Petra Szemán

Petra Szemán is known for their video works that feature their digital avatar, usually found journeying through a mixture of real world footage and animated realms. Szemán’s avatar makes ‘Anime Pilgrimages’, visiting real life locations featured in animated films and tv shows watched by the artist and millions of others around the globe.

For Supermedium, Szemán will introduce sculptural elements into their work on a more ambitious scale than ever before. A new body of work will house video pieces within an installation that incorporates ceramics and large, hand-painted screens.

These transparent screens operate as enlarged versions of the layers of celluloid artists have more traditionally and historically used to create animations. Animators draw background imagery, foreground objects and characters onto plastic sheets which are then placed on top of each other. For Szemán, there is something special about the way animators bring these elements together, to create rich worlds of stories and characters. It speaks to the way we make sense of our own lived experience, piecing together observations, memories and sensations into a cohesive picture of our reality.

Visitors will be invited to carry out Szemán’s long held desire to slip between the layers of an animation. To look through the layers like the camera would, causing imagery to shift and align as you move in front and between the work.