Amy Sillman (with Marina Rosenfeld, sound) : Minute Cinema: 4 videos for 4 seasons
Lower Exhibition Space

Amy Sillman began experimenting with handmade animation in the early 2010s as a way to further extend her practice, which had already expanded to zine-making in 2009. Her short digital videos, often made by scanning or photographing drawings and painting fragments, then sequencing them frame by frame, create a sense of restless transformation. These works occupy a fascinating space between painting, drawing, and the moving image. They feel intimate and provisional, like notes or thoughts caught in motion. Sillman has described animation as “drawing that moves”, and her videos indeed retain the tactile, handmade quality of her studio process.

Minute Cinema: 4 videos for 4 seasons (2024–25) was commissioned by The Washington Post, which invited Sillman to create an artwork and write a column once per season for a year. In the politically charged year leading up to the election, she proposed a project deliberately “out of sync” with the expectations of a major newspaper and its readership: a one-minute animation for each season, each with a distinct mood. She invited composer and artist Marina Rosenfeld to collaborate on the sound. The first animation, Abstraction as Ruin (Spring), was followed by Abstraction as Apprehension (Summer) and Abstraction as X-Ray (Fall). The final fourth video did not appear in the Washington Post, but Sillman and Rosenfeld completed the cycle with Abstraction as Insomnia (Winter) made specifically for this exhibition.

The four works extend Sillman’s long-standing dialogue between painting, drawing, and movement into a cyclical meditation on time, perception, and emotional weather. Each short animation translates her gestural vocabulary of figures, marks, and color fields that continuously dissolve and re-form into motion. Rather than illustrating the seasons literally, the series uses them as metaphors for psychic and social states: renewal, collapse, hesitation, and recovery. Hand-drawn frames compose short bursts of unstable forms, set to Rosenfeld’s layered sound, which ranges from slapstick to dissonance. The humor and absurdity of the animations carry a political undertone, an insistence that abstraction and awkwardness might still serve as tools of survival in the face of collective crisis.

As figures fumble their way into abstraction, accompanied by improvised soundtracks and fragments of conversation, the comic deepens into an inquiry into emotion and perception: how does an image convey a feeling that changes before it can be fixed? In this sense, Sillman’s videos extend the psychological and philosophical concerns of her painting – about embodiment, intimacy, and uncertainty – into the temporal dimension of film.

Rosenfeld’s sound design, shifting between resonance and stillness, amplifies this sense of precarious interiority, of breathing through instability. Across the cycle, Sillman turns animation into a time-based analog of painting: a process of perpetual becoming rather than depiction. Her seasonal videos are not simply about nature’s rhythms but about the mutable, vulnerable conditions of consciousness itself – how thought, emotion, and form continually break down and regenerate in the shared air we breathe.

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