James Barth and Spencer Harvie | ZONWEE: The last known recording of a daydream
ZONWEE: The last known recording of a daydream is a short animated film by James Barth and Spencer Harvie that combines both of the artist’s unique skills, styles, and ideas to produce something neither of them could create by themselves. The title ZONWEE is a phonetic spelling of the portmanteau of “zany” and “ennui” which reflects the names of the two characters in the film.
This short film project was the result of a six-month collaboration wherein the artists would meet regularly to present each other with lists of ideas, objects, images, and sayings. The artists then wrote a master list that combined both of the artist’s ideas. The project was then initiated from this collaboratively written list.
3d animation was chosen as the vehicle to bring the collaborative list of ideas to life as it allowed both artists to use all of their skill sets together in one medium. The animation itself is a short narrated view into an IKEA-esque world dotted with half-eaten cakes, kid’s building blocks, snails, and blobby life forms. The two main characters spend time investigating, prodding, and looking at the curious list of objects in their world. The artists suggest that ZONWEE: The last known recording of a daydream is a portrait of the two artists that reflects the difficulty in managing friendship, ideas, skills, and admin during artistic collaborations. While artists have their own private interpretation of the film: James and Spencer encourage the audience to make sense of the world in the film in the same way the two characters investigate their environment like odd detectives.
Max Athans | Intercessors Theme
Intercessors Theme is the latest body of images and sculptural works by artist Max Athans. Centralizing on the anaemic and membranous qualities of digital image as they slide, cut and explode in sudden shuddering graphic conflagrations. Massively circulated, innocuous and low-resolution images clash and merge with their physical counterparts in the form of reproduced artefacts. As images compacted to points of abstraction connect in unexpected and contradictory ways timelines through history are established, short lived speculative narratives behaving as visual artefacts and smears. A short circuiting of history, an alternate unstable economy of symbols and histories.
Max Athans (b.1999) is a recent graduate from a BFA at QCA and is an artist working across sculptural, digital and design mediums. Their work situates itself within concerns of contemporary history, image politics and digital subculture.
