Dubai-based Brazilian artist Jessica Mein combines drawing, painting, collage, photography and video to create her unique animation artworks. Each of her videos is based on a simple visual of some everyday activity; but the images and interventions that seep into that visual result in a complex, multilayered structure of thoughts, emotions and ideas woven together. Mein's videos have no beginning or end, because rather than creating a time-based narrative, she is interested in the interplay of time and space and in playing with the materiality of different media.
"I come from a family of lace-makers and their way of marking time in making their laborious work always moved me. I have been interested in drawing since childhood but when I went to New York to study art, I was introduced to the medium of video and liked it because the material of video is time. However, while working on my videos, I really began to miss drawing and the materiality of paper. So I started experimenting with ways to blend the two media," she says.
Mein began by printing out her videos, drawing on top of them and scanning the work to create animated images. She enjoyed this dialogue between her drawings and her videos. "By transferring the video images on to paper, I am treating the film as a flimsy piece of paper. The truth of the film thus becomes a precarious truth that can be bent, cut and folded," Mein says.
In her debut exhibition in Dubai, curated by Larissa Kolesnikova, Mein is displaying five short animations, along with select works on paper.
One of her earliest experiments in mixed media animation is titled DeleveleD. It features a woman endlessly walking up and down a spiral staircase. As suggested by the visual and the palindromic title, this work is about the endless loop of time. As the woman walks, the stairs seem to disappear and reappear under her feet, creating a sense of instability. Interspersed with the video are images of a building in Mein's birthplace, Sao Paulo, designed by a well-known architect, and her ink drawings of delicate lace. Through this seamless transition between video, photographs and drawings, the artist comments on the ephemeral yet infinite nature of time and the delicate, unstable structure of the society we live in.
In Cegueira, which is Portuguese for "blindness", the main actor is a venetian blind. As it moves up and down, it is like a metronome marking time — or a curtain that reveals and conceals a world that lies beyond.
And this world consists of gritty images of the city with graffiti-covered walls and of empty fruit crates carelessly stacked to form precarious structures, interlaced with pictures of sleek modernist architecture and rows of dog houses. The artwork is made up of over 600 drawings, collages and animated pictures. Besides the visual reference to the neglected, ugly underbelly of a big city, there is also a metaphorical aspect to the work. "These dog houses are made from the wooden crates shown in the video. They are meant to be homes for pets, but the irony is that they are made by homeless people, who live on the streets," Mein says.
Crates of fruits also feature in Natureza Morta. Here, Mein has shot a video of a fruit vendor in rural Argentina setting up a temporary stall by stacking the crates against a wall and then clearing them all up at the end of the day. Once again, Mein explores the idea of unstable structures created from the crates and the endless loop of time. But here, she also plays on the words "Natureza Morta" or "still life" by using cutouts of famous still-life paintings of fruits by masters such as Cezanne and works by anonymous artists.
In her latest work, titled Blackout, Mein has used videos, photos and drawings of power lines in Dubai. Marking a new direction in her work, she has manipulated the images by cutting, splicing, bending and overlaying them to reflect how the horizon is being spliced and diced by the crisscrossing power lines.
The video begins with a white space, which is gradually filled with the ever-changing patterns created by the power lines and towers merging and sliding away, and the patches of blue sky in between till they accumulate to create a complete blackout.
"This work is made up of more than a thousand drawings, collages, over-layered stills and scanned images ,and the manipulation of the paper takes the synthesis of the mechanical and man-made in my work to another level. And the non-narrative progression from white horizon to black makes it almost an abstract animation about slicing space and time," Mein says. "All my videos are silent because I want them to have a dialogue with my drawings and sound would distract from that," she adds.
Blackout will run at The Pavilion Downtown Dubai until March 8.
