'Live Cinema' Presents Multifaceted Work Of Carlos Amorales

Born in 1970 in Mexico City, Amorales studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademia in Amsterdam. Over the last decade the artist has developed a unique visual vocabulary in mediums ranging from drawing and animation to installation and performance. Four Animations, Five Drawings, and a Plague traces the development of Amorales's "Liquid Archive," a database of digital images that he uses in his work, whether alone and in collaborative projects.

This selection underscores the role of the artist as critical filter and role in examining forms and their potential meaning. In his work, Amorales dissolves boundaries between his media: humans become animals and animals assume human forms, or a sinister hybrid of the two. Familiar images and objects are rendered mysterious and menacing in surreal visions that are influenced by gothic literature, mythological motifs, and Mexican popular culture. Black Cloud (2007), the installation accompanying the animations and drawings takes the Liquid Archive into a three-dimensional realm. Selected Ghosts (composition) 01-05 (2008) is a series of paper collages that is shown for the first time. In these works the artist uses vector graphics to generate the outline of various images from his archive, capturing their silhouettes. Images of skulls, spiderwebs, birds, trees and the human form are repeated and transformed in the various compositions, as their outlines appear to merge and dissolve.

The selection of black and white single-channel animations reflects the artist's fascination with hybrid imagery, including the crossbred wolf-human creature in the Manimal (2005) and the rapid-fire shapes and forms in Faces (2007). These films, along with the playful Rorschach Test Animation (2004), which presents a shifting series of inkblots against a white background, push figurative representation to its limits, in the process enabling the artist to develop his own abstract visual language. -- www.philamuseum.org