Carlos Amorales

Useless Wonder

2006

Carlos Amorales, Useless Wonder, 2006. Video Installation.

The animation for Useless Wonder is composed of digital vector drawings drawn from the artist’s image archive. Figurative and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a palette of red, black and white, are combined to create a world of fantasy rich in dream, horror, and plastic potential. The graphic imagery contains animals, humans, nature, mythological figures, constantly morphing into one another in an intoxicating depiction of chaos and order. The world is represented in a constant state of flux and the soundtrack heightens a threatening atmosphere.This work was based on the 1838 novel by Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, recounting a sea voyage. Poe was famous for his interest in cryptography and pictograms which must have captured Amorales’ imagination.The other screen features a world map disassembling and reassembling, between geological catastrophe and formation, in accordance with the apocalyptic title.

Carlos Amorales works in various mediums, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance. Central to his practice is the construction and alteration of what he calls his Liquid Archive, a collection of images, narratives, drawings, shapes, and ideas that he uses to construct his unique visual language—a critical and stimulating space for fantasy, reality, and the blurring of the two. Amorales creates tensions between revealing and hiding the personal and the universal in his often-ambiguous and fluid constructions. He transforms this iconographic store into his signature graphic style which then transfers into his practice which involves paintings, drawings and installations, video animations and performances. He works with motion graphic designers, media researchers, and musicians to explore collective unconsciousness based on media-driven codes of perception and spectacle.

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Carlos Amorales Useless Wonder

Carlos Amorales

Useless Wonder