この度、PARCELではレオミ・サドラーとラッセル・モーリスによる二人展「IJMIA THING」を開催いたします。本展で提示されるのは、アニメーションが持つ根源的な力への探究です。

「映画（movies）」や「フリックス（flicks）」といった言葉が示す通り、アニメーションの語源には「動く映像」「揺らめく光」という直截的な意味が潜んでいます。さらに “to animate” の語源 animare は「息を吹き込む」を意味し、彼らにとって、アニメーションは単なる動く映像表現ではなく、無生物に生命を宿し、固定性を拒み、変容や無限の可能性を切り開く行為として位置づけられます。

サドラーとモーリスにとって、アニメーションは「低俗」や「子供向け」といった固定観念を超え、制度的な「美術」の枠組みの外から生まれる表現の豊かさを体現しています。ファインアートにおける承認の外側で、サブカルチャーやアウトサイダー的実践から立ち上がるイメージの力に光を当てることで、彼らは美術制度が排除してきた領域を批評的に浮かび上がらせます。

子供のころ「アニメーション」は単に「動く漫画」を指す言葉のように思われたが、“to animate” という動詞は静止画を動くように見せる行為を意味すると同時に、その語源はラテン語 animare ―「息を吹き込む」に由来し、anima は「生命」や「呼吸」を意味する。アニメーションとはすなわち「生命を与える行為」であり、無生物に存在を与え、無意識かつ静止していた世界に意識と運動をもたらす変容そのものを意味するのである。

（中略）

アニミズムは子供っぽく、迷信的な「未開」の信仰であり、西洋的理性に対立する認知上の誤謬とされた。その「礼儀正しき社会」から排除された卑俗な立場は、同時に現代美術制度におけるアニメーションや漫画の位置と可笑しくも重なり合う。

しかしながら、「美術」という語自体が「現代美術」によって占有されている今日においても、いわゆるファインアートの領域は、実際に存在する無数の表現世界のごく一部に過ぎない。制度的承認や正当化を必要とせず、衝動や執着に駆動される広大な実践の領域が存在する。サブカルチャーの隙間から、郊外の倦怠から、アウトサイダーや日常の雑踏から生まれる表現において、そこに宿る「生命」や「芸術」と「錬金術」の境界は開かれ続けるのだ。

レオミ・サドラーとラッセル・モーリスにとって、伝統的なアニメーションは決定的な影響源である。彼らの実践は、卑俗と崇高、高と低、滑稽と抽象の薄膜を突き抜け、単なる「アート」を超えた領域へと踏み込む。

（中略）

今日の多くのアニメーションは、リアリズムへの偏執によって潜在的可能性を失い、かえって自壊に至っている。しかしサドラーとモーリスの実践は、アナログ的で彫刻的なアニメーションの力を再確認するものだ。セル画は一枚ごとに固有の作品であり、平面でありながら立体、透明でありつつ不透明、二次元と三次元の両義性を抱える。強迫的な反復を要する制作過程は狂気の縁に立たせると同時に、壮大さを拒み、むしろ慎ましきものへと目を向けさせる。像が瞬き、動き出すとき、私たちはその生命を否応なく感じ取ってしまう。それは「生き、呼吸する」存在としての感覚であり、骨が突き出し潰れ合い、変容と変形を繰り返す運動である。すなわち物理法則を拒むだけでなく、物理そのものを新たに思考し直す契機となるのである。

—ラッセル・モーリス

（二人展「IJMIA THING」ステートメントより一部抜粋）

両名の制作は、セル画のように一枚ごとが固有でありながら反復されるプロセスを持ち、静と動、平面と立体、透明と不透明といった両義性を抱えています。そこに宿る生命の瞬きは、物理法則に従うのではなく、物理そのものを問い直す契機となります。

「IJMIA THING」は、アニメーションが持つ魔術的な可能性を再考し、美術制度の外縁から問いを投げかける展示となるでしょう。

PARCEL is pleased to present IJMIA THING, a duo exhibition by Leomi Sadler and Russell Maurice. This exhibition offers an exploration into the primal force inherent within animation.

As terms like ‘movies’ and ‘flicks’ suggest, the etymology of animation carries a direct meaning of ‘moving images’ and ‘flickering light.’ Furthermore, the very word “to animate” stems from the Latin animare, meaning “to breathe life into.” For Sadler and Maurice, animation is not merely a form expression using moving-images but an act of imbuing the inanimate with life. Animation is conceived as an act that defies stasis, open to transformation and boundless potential.

For Sadler and Morris, animation goes beyond the conventional ideas of “lowbrow” or “for children,” embodying the richness of expression that emerges outside the structures of institutional art. By drawing attention to imagery rooted in subculture and outsider practices, they offer a critical perspective on the art world’s marginalized spaces.

Whilst as a child, the word ‘animation’ simply seemed to signify a moving cartoon, the phrase ‘to animate’ implying the act of turning a still picture into one that implied motion, the technical root of the word comes from the Latin expression animare, meaning ‘to give breath to’ (from the word anima meaning ‘life’ or ‘breath’). Animation thus literally means ‘the action of imparting life’. It means the giving of existence, the ability to take something inanimate and blow the breath of being into it. It means the transformation of the lifeless into the living, the ability to produce consciousness and motion when there was previously only an unconscious and motionless world.

[excerpt]

…animism was a cognitive falsity present amongst the childish, the superstitious, the savage, a system of belief opposed to the rationality of the Western mind. Its position outside of the respectable confines of polite society, then, as something understood as crude or vulgar, similarly (and in fact comically) mirrors the very position of cartoons and animation within the respectable frameworks of the contemporary art world. 

Now whilst the word ‘art’ may have today been stolen by ‘contemporary’ art – the dominance of western art institutions themselves coming to dominate the conception of what can or cannot exist within the term – the output of the fine arts is of course just a tiny fraction of the art being made today. There are vast art worlds far beyond the Art World, worlds in which its rules and rationales (let alone its capital ‘h’ History) are entirely inconsequential, worlds which thrive beyond the need for justification, beyond the need for framing either within the structure of the art world or from the site of a truly outsider art. Here, the impact, the instantaneity, the necessity of practice overwhelms any need for institutional approval, overwhelms a need for meaning beyond impulse and obsession. Whether seen in the niches of subcultures or from the boredom of the burbs, from the weirdos and outsiders or in the humdrum of the everyday, people make things, feel their agency, help them come alive. Here what is deemed animate or inert, deemed art or alchemy, is more open for question (or the question itself deemed moot).

For Leomi Sadler and Russell Maurice, two artists for whom traditional animation has been a critical influence on their work, the thin layer between the mundane and the sublime, between the high and the low, the comic and the abstract, pushes their practice into this space beyond mere ‘Art’ alone.

[excerpt]

…much animation today has fallen victim to a cartoon physics in which realism has overtaken potentiality. Rather than disruptive, uncontrollable, digital animation has led to a strange respect for realism to the point of its own obsolescence. Its perfection makes it disappear. Yet what Sadler and Maurice also share alongside their skewed, off-centre, wigged-out visual world is an analogous fixation on the analogue and sculptural capacity of animation. Here, each cel is not only understood as an individual art work in its own right but as an object both flat and solid, transparent and opaque, two- and three-dimensional simultaneously. Moreover, the demanding process of traditional production that the two have chosen creates both a dense precision, forcing one to indulge in the act of repetition (or go mad), as well as clear permission to reject the grand and focus instead on the modest. How can we not just suggest motion but bring things to life? How can we merge these different worlds and bring a new world into creation? Within this enforced austerity, then, magic can still accrue. The flickering of the images, their movement in front of our eyes, not only makes our brain believe (or tricks it, perhaps) but simultaneously makes us feel their animative quality whether we want to or not. We feel its personhood. The way they live and breathe. The way they loop, the way they splurge and they walk. The way their bones protrude and squish together. The way they transubstantiate and metamorphosise, not just rejecting physics but finding a new way of thinking through physics itself.

— Russell Maurice

(Excerpt from a duo exhibition “IJMIA THING” statement)

The works of both artists follow a process in which each frame, like a cel, is unique yet repetitive, embodying dualities of stasis and motion, flat and dimensional, transparent and opaque. The flicker of life within these works does not adhere to the laws of physics, but instead offers a moment to reconsider them.

IJMIA THING reconsiders the magical capacities of animation and raises questions from the margins of the art world.