Raspberry Poser

The world of Raspberry Poser, a new video by New York-based artist Jordan Wolfson, is inhabited by silvery heart-filled condoms, mutating red blood cells, a lock and key in coitus, a listless punk, a destructive shapeshifting kid and a rubbery anthropomorphic HIV virus. Set against a backdrop of still and moving images and a pop soundtrack, the actors and animated objects float, bounce and pulsate from one scene to the next––their rhythmic activities framed by Soho boutiques, children’s bedrooms, Parisian parks and the paintings of Caravaggio. The systems of reference in Wolfson’s Raspberry Poser are varied and disparate, but linger on the inherent flatness of hand-drawn animation and the illusion of depth and realism afforded by recent advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI). Seemingly limitless in possibility and scope, the video’s scenarios draw upon the technical abilities of commercial animators to create worlds and forms based in life and digital images but with no binding reality. Employing materials culled from Internet image searches, the artist’s own lived experience and the histories of art and popular entertainment, Raspberry Poser touches upon and undermines the gravity of such pervasive themes as life, death and love. An assembly of found images, sampled music, commissioned animations and scenes filmed on location in Paris and New York are subject to a series of formal strategies borrowed from the history of animated cartoons, including a disregard of the fourth wall through direct address; the endless repetition and mutation of form; a malleable and permeable cinematic frame; and the appearance of depth on a layered two-dimensional plane. Through these means, Raspberry Poser considers the developments of digital and analog animation as essential to the histories of modernism and modernity, responsible for shaping and relaying the concerns of sculptural and pictorial modes of representation since its invention and defining our relationship to images and objects.