Machine for Framing
2023Wood, plexiglass, steel angles, LED strips, gear motor, 16mm sprockets, 16mm film
Machine for Framing is a kinetic film sculpture composed of an illuminated steel and plexiglass box, inside of which a closed loop of 16mm film slowly ambulates. Two peepholes cut into the white plexiglass surface allow viewers to peer in, observing only small fragments of the film at a time. The film strip is layered in such a way that faint suggestions of figures, images, or familiar colour schemes occasionally appear, but the constrained viewing angle forbids any synoptic understanding of the time-based object.
The 16mm film strip features a replication of one of the final works by American painter Howard Pyle, commissioned by the DuPont chemical company in 1912. A major catalyst behind the so-called “Golden Age of American Illustration,” Pyle founded a school of painting known as the “Brandywine School” near Wilmington, Delaware, in the late 1890s. DuPont, by far the most powerful company and family in Delaware, also held its centres of corporate and familial power in the Brandywine Valley at the time, and was inextricably involved in the painting school’s development and reach. Influential alumni from the Brandywine School include N.C Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Violet Oakley, Eleanor Abbott, and many others.
The painting depicted on the film strip, titled DuPont Powder Wagon, was laser-printed on an 8”x10” grid of 16mm film segments, which were then reassembled in a linear strip.
Doubly abstracted, viewed through the inscrutable machine’s narrow aperture, the painting’s forensic index of military-industrial will imprinting on cultural soft-power is transformed into a hypnotic colour field.
